TBR NewsA Basilisk Press Publication2015-08-01T12:15:18Zhttp://www.tbrnews.org/?feed=atomWordPressadminhttp://www.tbrnews.org/?p=10102015-08-01T12:15:18Z2015-08-01T12:15:18ZThe Voice of the White House

Washington, D.C. July 25, 2015: “We are waiting with baited breath for the next news eruption to occupy our boring life. Another lunatic shoots people in a movie theater, the police riddle a black five year old because the lollypop he pointed at one of the just might have been a machinegun, The State of Georgia sues a man for copyright violations because he dared to reprint their state constitution, and the Greeks have left the headlines and are engaged in interior-lihne mud throwing in advance of being booted out of the collapsing EU. The First World War breoke out in August so there is still hope for more excitement for news buffs. Donald Trump is driving most politicians crazy because his anti-immigrant speeches are being well-received from an American public tired of Kumbaya nonsense and rants about brotherood and the loving of neighbors. If Trump ever gets elected to the White House, there will be hell to pay in editorial rooms and other determiners of what the public ought to hear, or not hear. But since Trump’s attitudes do not impinge on the activities of the CIA, he is relatively safe from assassination.”

In Greek crisis, one big unhappy EU family

July 19, 2015

by Paul Taylor

Reuters

BRUSSELS The latest paroxysm of Greece’s debt crisis has exposed growing rifts in the euro zone which, unless addressed soon, could lead to the break-up of European monetary union, the EU’s most ambitious project.

The most worrying sign for European leaders is that public opinion and domestic politics are pulling them increasingly in opposing directions – not just between Greece and Germany, the biggest debtor and the biggest creditor, but almost everywhere.

Germans, Finns, Dutch, Balts and Slovaks no longer want taxpayers’ money to go to bail out Greeks, while the French, Italians and Greeks feel the euro zone is all about austerity and punishment and lacks solidarity and economic stimulus.

With central and east European states growing more assertive and the Dutch and Finns facing mounting domestic constraints, a compromise between euro zone leaders Germany and France, increasingly hard to find over Greece, is no longer sufficient to settle the problems.

There are so many stakeholders with divergent views that crisis management is becoming ever more difficult. A far-reaching reform of the 19-nation currency area’s flawed structure seems a remote prospect.

After weeks of late-night emergency meetings of leaders and finance ministers, culminating in a tense all-night summit, the euro zone produced a fragile deal to keep Greece afloat by making it a virtual protectorate under intrusive supervision.

Few, if any, of the main protagonists think it will work.

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said it was a bad deal that would make life worse for Greece but he had swallowed it because the alternative was worse. German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said Athens would have done better to leave the euro zone – “temporarily” – to get a debt write-off.

Chancellor Angela Merkel, Europe’s dominant leader, made clear the main virtue of the deal was to avoid something worse.

“The alternative to this agreement would not be a ‘time-out’ from the euro … but rather predictable chaos,” she said.

A senior EU official involved in brokering the compromise, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said there was now a “20, maybe 30 percent chance of success”.

“When I look at the next two to three years, the next three months, I see only black clouds,” the official said. “All we succeeded in doing was to avoid a chaotic Grexit.”

Problems are likely to resurface in late August or September when it comes to concluding the detailed negotiations on a three-year bailout program. By then Greece’s economy may have gone further off the rails and Greeks may be heading for early elections.

The International Monetary Fund is due to make another analysis of Greek debt before a deal is concluded which may well show that only a “haircut”, or outright write-down of loans, can make it sustainable.

Schaeuble, who says a “haircut” is illegal in the euro zone, will be waiting with his Plan B for debt relief with Greece outside the currency area.

Even if the third Greek bailout in five years does not trip up at that stage, the chances of it being fully implemented and delivering an economic recovery look slim.

The Greek crisis has also widened divisions between euro and non-euro members, with Britain and the Czech Republic insisting on guarantees for their taxpayers’ money in exchange for using an EU-wide bailout fund for bridge finance.

If the Greek crisis were the euro zone’s only worry, it might be easier to isolate and resolve it, since financial markets have shown little sign of the contagion to other weak sovereigns’ bonds that threatened to tear it apart in 2012.

Greece has been such a distraction that leaders barely noted an important report authored by European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker with the heads of four other EU institutions on how to make the monetary union work better.

That is arguably the biggest challenge facing the EU, yet there is little sign of willingness to contemplate pooling more fiscal sovereignty or sharing more common liabilities as the authors say is required.

The debt crisis that began in 2010 led to the creation of some new institutions to strengthen the currency area – a permanent bailout fund, stricter enforcement of fiscal rules, a single banking supervisor and a joint mechanism for winding down failed banks.

But German-led opposition to mutualising debt, French-led resistance to yielding more control over national budgets and the electoral rise of Eurosceptic populist parties prevented the euro area going further.

In Brussels, there is much talk of how the latest Greek crisis should prompt a leap forward in integration to strengthen the euro zone, but it’s not clear what progress is possible.

Among the quick wins suggested by the “five presidents’ report” is a common deposit insurance scheme for euro zone banks that are under ECB supervision and a fiscal backstop for a bank resolution fund being raised from the finance sector.

Whether such ideas will fly in Berlin remains to be seen. In the longer term, after 2017, the report envisages setting up a euro area treasury accountable at the European level.

French President Francois Hollande suggested this month creating a parliament for the euro zone to give decisions greater democratic legitimacy.

Such ambitious visions stand at odds with frantic nocturnal crisis management and the increasingly divisive nationalist tone of much of the debate in the euro area.

(Writing by Paul Taylor, editing by Richard Mably)

The man who cost Greece billions

July 20, 2015

by Dina Kyriakidou

Reuters

ATHENS-Once again Alexis Tsipras was struggling to make a decision. For hours on July 13, the Greek prime minister and Europe’s leaders had been trying to thrash out a new deal to bail out bankrupt Greece and keep the country in the euro zone.

Now a clean copy of the latest text had been printed, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Francois Hollande and European Council President Donald Tusk were satisfied with the terms. So too appeared Tsipras – but he left the room to check the details one more time with colleagues in his leftist party Syriza.

Nearly an hour later he had still not returned. Heads of government and state paced around, fiddling with their phones. The Lithuanian president and Slovenian prime minister said they could wait no longer and left through a backdoor, a diplomat involved in the summit said.

When Tsipras finally reappeared, his response confirmed what Europe’s leaders had suspected for some time: without the full backing of his party, the Greek leader could not commit. The drafting process had to begin anew.

The setback reinforced European doubts that Tsipras could control his party. Friends and associates say the 40-year-old’s calm demeanor belies a man struggling to balance Syriza, Greece’s economic interests and his own leftist ideology. At many points he has turned to a small team of advisers, conferring with them again and again before making major decisions.

Tsipras’s strategy going into the bailout talks was to push international partners to the edge, betting they would make concessions to prevent Greece crashing out of the euro zone. In the event, though, he was forced to blink first and then ad-lib his way through the crisis that ensued.

He found himself pressed on the one side by the Germans, who didn’t want to give another penny to prop up Greece, and on the other by his own political party, which opposed the austerity demanded in return for a bailout.

The indecision and delays have cost Greece about 30 billion euros in the last three weeks alone, according to one senior European Union (EU) official. Tsipras’ inability to cut a deal in early July, which forced Greek banks to close their doors and sent the economy plunging, has pushed up the cost of the latest bailout to 86 billion euros, from the 53 billion euros Greece was requesting only a few weeks ago.

Tsipras would not speak to Reuters for this story. But he told Greek state broadcaster ERT on July 15 that he had made mistakes and taken some bad decisions. But at least he was a straight talker, he said. “You can accuse me of many things, that I had illusions that this Europe can be defeated, that the power of what’s right can defeat the power of banks and money. But you cannot accuse me of lying to the Greek people.”

A former Syriza colleague who has known Tsipras since he was a teenager and is now with another party said: “He has grown in leaps politically, but his decisions are a result of his fears. Fear that he will be the prime minister who led Greece out of the euro, fear his party will split, and also fear he is betraying the ideology he has fought for and believed in since he was a child.”

METEORIC RISE

Born in 1974 a few days after Greece’s return to democracy following seven years of military dictatorship, Tsipras joined the youth branch of the Communist Party when he was just 14. Three years later he moved to a more liberal-minded splinter group that would later be renamed Syriza.

Until a renovation a few months ago, a portrait of Che Guevara hung outside Tsipras’ office in Syriza headquarters in Athens. “At 16, I read Marx and believed capitalism would end and we would go to the next stage of society, which is socialism. To me, this was absolute,” he said in a 2008 interview with student paper Schooligans. “I was wrong. Now I know it’s not absolute. It may happen, but it may not.”

Tsipras rose through Syriza’s ranks swiftly. As head of the party’s youth wing he “was a good manager of daily issues but didn’t give the impression he would be a great leader,” said an older Syriza member who has known Tsipras since he was a teenager.

Nevertheless, party president Alekos Alavanos picked him as a candidate in the 2006 race to be mayor of Athens. With youth and sincerity on his side, Tsipras unexpectedly received 10.5 percent of the vote – not enough to win, but a massive gain for what was still a tiny party.

“Alavanos catapulted him to the top. He really fought with others in the party to establish him because he believed Alexis was the only hope for the (Left) Coalition,” said the former Syriza member, referring to a forerunner of the party.

At 33, Tsipras was president of the party, the youngest political leader in the history of modern Greece. By 40, with no experience of national government, he was prime minister, elected on the promise of ending austerity but keeping Greece in the euro zone.

Even his mentor did not think the promise stacked up. Alavanos, now 65, left Syriza years ago and heads a small party that advocates Greece’s exit from the euro zone. He has never publicly discussed Tsipras and refused to comment on their relationship for this story. But he did criticize the idea that Greece can stay in the euro and not implement austerity. “Basic intelligence dictates this is impossible,” Alavanos said.

INNER CIRCLE

Like the prime minister, Tsipras’ team of close advisers had little experience of government or international politics. In large part, members of his inner circle are trusted friends of a similar ideology and age.

His closest confidant is Minister of State Nikos Pappas, two years his junior. Pappas, an economist, was living in Scotland with no plans to return to Greece when Tsipras asked him to join him in 2008.

Tsipras also brought in British-trained economist Yanis Varoufakis, who had been an academic in Britain, Australia and the United States. He offered a way to build bridges with Europe and the United States. “(Tsipras) took him in because he broke some barriers for us,” said a Syriza insider. “He was recognizable and he had international connections.”

But Varoufakis was also radical and outspoken. Appointed finance minister after Syriza won power in January, he proved to be less bridge builder and more destroyer as he negotiated with international lenders. He angered many in Europe with his blunt rhetoric and unorthodox ideas. Even Tsipras was shocked to hear about a Varoufakis’ plan to recruit average Greeks and tourists to act as tax inspectors, insiders said.

As negotiations floundered, these two key figures in the Greek government went in different directions. Varoufakis, who would not speak for this story, eventually quit, saying he felt Tsipras was ready to reach a deal with Greece’s creditors at any price.

In all the turmoil, Tsipras also had two confidants of a different nature. One was Minister of State Alekos Flambouraris, who had worked with Tsipras’ late father in the construction industry. People close to Tsipras say the 73-year-old Flambouraris offers emotional support as his leader tries to balance party, country and principles.

Tsipras’ other support was his partner Betty Batziana, his high school sweetheart. At home they still lead a quiet and modest life, little changed from before he became prime minister.

Batziana has studiously stayed out of the limelight. In one of her few contacts with the media during a trip to Moscow, reporters asked whether it was true, as some British media suggested, that she had said she would leave Tsipras if he agreed to a bad deal for Greece. In reply, she laughed.

MOTLEY BUNCH

Tsipras’ inner team started to discuss the idea of a referendum in April, as it became increasingly clear Greece’s creditors would not budge on their austerity demands. Their aim was to use a vote on the EU’s bailout terms as a way to entrench the prime minister as the dominant political figure in Greece, rally public support around him and give him leverage with lenders, insiders say.

While popular support was important, this overlooked two important factors. First, Greece’s only real bargaining chip with its lenders was the threat of the chaos that might ensue if it had to leave the euro zone. Second, Tsipras was struggling to keep Syriza – a motley bunch of 16 groups, ranging from Maoists to environmentalists – united.

Some far-left members wanted Greece to leave the euro zone and go back to the drachma. “In the last few weeks, Tsipras had to keep a balance between keeping Greece in the euro and holding his own party together,” a former senior Syriza official said.

Greece’s international partners grew increasingly frustrated with Tsipras and his lack of decisiveness. On June 24, Tsipras met for hours at European Commission headquarters with International Monetary Fund boss Christine Lagarde, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi and Eurogroup finance ministers.

Two people familiar with the talks said Tsipras appeared to agree at least twice on terms for a bailout, only to request a time-out to consult with his delegation, which included Varoufakis and Pappas.

Each time, he returned to the room without his normal smile and said the package was “unacceptable,” causing immense irritation and loss of trust, the two sources said.

“He brought this busload of Syriza activists with him, and each time we thought we had a deal, he would go next door and consult the comrades, and come back stony-faced saying it was impossible,” one of the sources said.

A Greek official said a mini-bus of Greek ministers and Syriza economists was in Brussels. “It is natural that the prime minister consults with his delegation,” the official said.

COMRADES

In the referendum, Greeks voted against tough bailout terms involving austerity. It was a huge victory for Tsipras, but the sense of elation didn’t last. He sought parliament’s approval to go back to the EU negotiating table and, unsure whether he could hold his government together, reached out to his political rivals for support.

The leaders of all Greece’s main parties except far-right Golden Dawn were called to a meeting at the presidential mansion on July 6. It lasted nearly seven hours. Insiders said Tsipras was accused of bringing Greece to the brink of disaster with his erratic behavior. Though Tsipras spent most of the time consulting EU leaders by telephone, he listened to his critics, spoke little and kept copious notes, the insider said. He looked tired and anxious and responded by saying: “We must all exercise self-criticism.”

At the end of the marathon meeting, a joint statement was issued, declaring the referendum’s resounding rejection of a bailout deal as a mandate to negotiate further. During a five-hour parliamentary debate that started after midnight and ended with Tsipras delivering a final appeal in a trembling voice, Syriza was in uproar.

Parliamentary offices filled with cigarette smoke despite a smoking ban. Syriza lawmakers walked the corridors telling reporters the government might not survive the night. Some Syriza lawmakers rebelled, but Tsipras won the vote with the support of other parties.

Wounded, but armed with parliament’s approval, he returned to Brussels for the final showdown. In reality, though, he was losing any leverage to negotiate and decisions were being forced on him.

As EU funding ran out, the government was compelled to close Greek banks and limited people to 60 euros a day from cash machines.

Tsipras looked exhausted. Some European leaders even urged him to get some rest. But with the intervention of the French, a deal was reached under which Greece agreed to accept even tougher economic reforms than had been on offer before. Tsipras announced it to his team calmly: “OK, we signed.”

In Athens, a group of Syriza supporters gathered around wine and meze in the leafy yard of a house in the leftist district of Exarcheia. The group was split between those who had wanted Tsipras to get a bailout deal and keep Greece in the euro, and those who advocated ending austerity – even if it meant going back to the drachma.

What was unanimous, however, was sympathy for Tsipras. “He may not have political experience but he is honorable and a fighter,” said Nikos Kapios, 80, a retired actor at the gathering.

At the weekend Tsipras reshuffled his cabinet, replacing several ministers who opposed the new EU deal. With Syriza divided, Tsipras, who remains popular with voters, may decide to hold another election later this year. “If he doesn’t make it,” said Kapios, “the blame is with his own comrades.”

Before Homes Are Even Rebuilt in the Ruins of the Gaza Strip, Another War Looms

by Max Blumenthal

TomDispatch

“A fourth operation in the Gaza Strip is inevitable, just as a third Lebanon war is inevitable,” declared Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman in February. His ominous comments came just days after an anti-tank missile fired by the Lebanon-based guerrilla group Hezbollah killed two soldiers in an Israeli army convoy. It, in turn, was a response to an Israeli air strike that resulted in the assassination of several high-ranking Hezbollah figures.

Lieberman offered his prediction only four months after his government concluded Operation Protective Edge, the third war between Israel and the armed factions of the Gaza Strip, which had managed to reduce about 20% of besieged Gaza to an apocalyptic moonscape. Even before the assault was launched, Gaza was a warehouse for surplus humanity — a 360-square-kilometer ghetto of Palestinian refugees expelled by and excluded from the self-proclaimed Jewish state. For this population, whose members are mostly under the age of 18, the violence has become a life ritual that repeats every year or two. As the first anniversary of Protective Edge passes, Lieberman’s unsettling prophecy appears increasingly likely to come true. Indeed, odds are that the months of relative “quiet” that followed his statement will prove nothing more than an interregnum between Israel’s ever more devastating military escalations.

Three years ago, the United Nations issued a report predicting that the Gaza Strip would be uninhabitable by 2020. Thanks to Israel’s recent attack, this warning appears to have arrived sooner than expected. Few of the 18,000 homes the Israeli military destroyed in Gaza have been rebuilt. Few of the more than 400 businesses and shops damaged or leveled during that war have been repaired. Thousands of government employees have not received a salary for more than a year and are working for free. Electricity remains desperately limited, sometimes to only four hours a day. The coastal enclave’s borders are consistently closed. Its population is trapped, traumatized, and descending ever deeper into despair, with suicide rates skyrocketing.

One of the few areas where Gaza’s youth can find structure is within the “Liberation Camps” established by Hamas, the Islamist political organization that controls Gaza. There, they undergo military training, ideological indoctrination, and are ultimately inducted into the Palestinian armed struggle. As I found while covering last summer’s war, there is no shortage of young orphans determined to take up arms after watching their parents and siblings be torn limb from limb by 2,000-pound Israeli fragmentation missiles, artillery shells, and other modes of destruction. Fifteen-year-old Waseem Shamaly, for instance, told me his life’s ambition was to join the Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas. He had just finished recounting through tears what it was like to watch a YouTube clip of his brother, Salem, being executed by an Israeli sniper while he searched for the rest of his family in the rubble of their neighborhood last July.

Anger with Hamas’s political wing for accepting a ceasefire agreement with Israel in late August 2014 that offered nothing but a return to the slow death of siege and imprisonment is now palpable among Gaza’s civilian population. This is particularly true in border areas devastated by the Israelis last summer. However, support for the Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas that carries the banner of the Palestinian armed struggle, remains almost unanimous.

Palestinians in Gaza need only look 80 kilometers east to the gilded Bantustans of the Palestinian Authority (PA) to see what they would get if they agreed to disarm. After years of fruitless negotiations, Israel has rewarded Palestinians living under the rule of PA President Mahmoud Abbas with the record growth of Jewish settlements, major new land annexations, nightly house raids, and the constant humiliation and dangers of daily interactions with Israeli soldiers and fanatical Jewish settlers. Rather than resist the occupation, Abbas’s Western-trained security forces coordinate directly with the occupying Israeli army, assisting Israel in the arrest and even torture of fellow Palestinians, including the leadership of rival political factions.

As punishing as life in Gaza might be, the West Bank model does not offer a terribly attractive alternative. Yet this is exactly the kind of “solution” the Israeli government seeks to impose on Gaza. As former Interior Minister Yuval Steinitz declared last year, “We want more than a ceasefire, we want the demilitarization of Gaza… Gaza will be exactly like [the West Bank city of] Ramallah.”

Keeping Gaza in Ruins

Behind the quasi-apocalyptic destruction exacted on Gaza by the Israeli military during Operation Protective Edge lies a sadistic strategy whose aim is to punish residents of the besieged coastal enclave into submission. The “Dahiya Doctrine,” named after a southern Beirut neighborhood the Israeli air force decimated in 2006, is focused on punishing the civilian populations of Gaza and southern Lebanon for supporting armed resistance movements like Hamas and Hezbollah. In “Disproportionate Force,” a 2008 paper published by the Institute for National Security Studies, a think tank closely linked to the Israeli military, Colonel Gabi Siboni spelled out its punitive, civilian-oriented logic clearly: “With an outbreak of hostilities, the [Israeli army] will need to act immediately, decisively, and with force that is disproportionate to the enemy’s actions and the threat it poses. Such a response aims at inflicting damage and meting out punishment to an extent that will demand long and expensive reconstruction processes.”

In the aftermath of Protective Edge’s massive destruction of civilian infrastructure in Gaza, the Israeli government set out to obstruct any reconstruction process and extend the suffering of Gaza’s civilian population. When diplomats including American Secretary of State John Kerry gathered in Cairo last October to discuss repairing and rebuilding some of the $7 billion in damage caused by Protective Edge, then-Israeli Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz assured them that their efforts were ultimately futile. “The Gazans must decide what they want to be: Singapore or Darfur,” Katz said, ominously invoking the threat of Sudanese-style genocide. “If one missile will be fired, everything will go down the drain.” The nature of his warning was not lost on the diplomats in Cairo, where one complained of “considerable donor fatigue.”

“No one can expect us to go back to our taxpayers for a third time; to ask for contributions for reconstruction and then we simply go back to where we were before all this began,” a diplomat complained to a reporter. Another conceded: “There isn’t a terrible amount of political commitment or hope.”

In the end, only a minuscule fraction of the $5 billion pledged at the conference has actually made its way to Gaza’s devastated masses. Instead, much of it has been diverted into the coffers of the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank, whose mission requires it to spend around 30% of its budget on “security,” or policing fellow Palestinians, on behalf of their occupier.

Earlier this year, as funds for reconstruction dried up entirely, the United Nations Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process Robert Serry attempted to compel Palestinians in Gaza to accept a rebuilding plan he concocted in cooperation with the Israeli military, the Egyptian military junta of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, and the PA. Described by Israeli military correspondent Ron Ben-Yishai as a model of “the conflict management approach,” the plan amounts to the internationalization of the siege of Gaza and the perpetual imprisonment of Palestinians there. Needless to say, it proved a non-starter among those whose lives it would have controlled.

Though Hamas has stringently maintained the ceasefire it inked when hostilities ended last August, Israel has repeatedly attacked Gaza’s fishermen as well as farmers working in areas near the Israeli border wall. As despair spreads, the previously minute ranks of Salafist extremists are expanding and pledging allegiance to the Islamic State (IS), the brutal theocratic crew that has established a “caliphate” in parts of Syria and Iraq and whose followers in Gaza have declared war on Hamas.

Gaza’s IS-allied factions have adopted a simple formula for undermining Hamas that begins with the launching of a crude rocket or mortar usually into an unpopulated area of southern Israel. That these do little or no damage hardly matters, since IS followers know that Israel will respond with airstrikes targeting Hamas-controlled facilities. Through these provocations, IS in Gaza has established an alliance of convenience with the Israeli military, with each relying on the other to tighten the vise on Hamas. Though IS has no chance now of toppling Hamas, its presence — and Israel’s apparent eagerness to play its game — has injected a volatile new element into an already unstable post-war landscape.

Field Testing the Brand

Hamas and allied militant groups like Palestinian Islamic Jihad entered last summer’s war with a set of conditions that were entirely humanitarian in nature. They called for the right to construct a seaport in Gaza, rebuild the airport Israel destroyed, and freely import and export goods, as well as for Gaza’s stateless residents to obtain travel permits. In exchange, Hamas offered Israel a 10-year truce. Rather than accept any of these conditions, which would have promoted a dramatic reduction in tensions, Israel and its allies in Cairo and Washington opted for 51 days of brutal warfare, knowing that Gaza’s civilians would pay the steepest price — and that an elite sector of Israeli society would reap handsome rewards.

Unlike the rulers of Gaza, Israel’s upper classes thrive off war. The assaults on Gaza since 2005 have invigorated one of the country’s leading industries and been a boon to the 150,000 Israeli families who earn their livelihoods from it. Thanks in large part to the wars in Gaza and the ongoing occupation of Palestine, Israel’s weapons industry has tripled its profits to more than $7 billion a year over the past decade, making a country about the size of New Jersey into the fourth largest weapons exporter in the world.

“A salesman for the IAI [Israel Aerospace Industries] told me that assassinations and operations in Gaza bring about an increase of tens of percentage points in company sales,” said Yotam Feldman, the Israeli journalist whose documentary film, The Lab, provides a disturbing look at the country’s weapons industry and how it has transformed Israeli society. According to Feldman, “the war in Gaza has become inherent to the Israeli political system, possibly a part of our system of government.”

Members of the Israeli elite have benefitted directly from the Gaza wars by orchestrating the assaults as generals and politicians and then taking jobs as lobbyists, marketing to foreign militaries the newest weaponry and battlefield tactics tested on Gaza’s civilian population. Ehud Barak, for instance, was the defense minister who directed Israel’s disproportionate attacks on Gaza in 2008-2009 and again in 2012. He was also one of the closest associates of Michael Federman, a former member of his Sayeret Matkal commando unit and a political advisor who also happened to be the owner of Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer, Elbit Systems. It was perhaps unsurprising then that, after leading the Defense Ministry during so many wars deploying and promoting Elbit’s latest weaponry, Barak’s name suddenly wound up on the Forbes list of Israel’s wealthiest politicians in 2012.

A quick browse through Israel Defense News, the leading English-language trade publication of Israel’s weapons industry, offers perhaps the best look at how new tactics and weaponry are marketed. In its latest issue, dedicated to the “new age warfare” practiced in Gaza, readers are assured that “2015 will be good for Israeli Defense Industries.” Uri Vered, general manager of Elbit Systems, promises that “land field systems” — the tanks and armored combat vehicles deployed in the recent conflict — will experience record growth.

Among the high tech weaponry being touted by the magazine is a drone “capable of loitering over the target and attacking it.” This is a reference to Israeli Aerospace Industries’ Harop, a “suicide drone” first tested in southern Lebanon that hovers over its target before diving into it with 10 kilograms of explosives packed into its nose. With militaries around the world snapping up the Harop by the hundreds, Israel’s weapons sector is eager to roll out a next generation vehicle that includes its own launch pad. In order to brand the newfangled drone with the magical marketing label of “field tested,” IAI simply needs another war.

The Point of No Return

To be sure, there are figures within Israel’s military-intelligence apparatus keen on averting another war with Gaza’s armed factions, at least in the near term. They recognize that Hamas has become a stabilizing force in Gaza capable of maintaining ceasefires in good faith. As it did with the Fatah-controlled Palestine Liberation Organization during the 1970s and 1980s, the Israeli military establishment has attempted to domesticate Hamas by assassinating “irreconcilables” like former Al-Qassam commander Ahmed Jaabari, while allowing more conciliatory and politically ambitious figures like Gazan Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh to rise. Its strategy is aimed at cultivating within Hamas the kind of docile leadership that now makes up the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, thereby transforming another self-proclaimed Palestinian resistance organization into an occupation subcontractor.

Yet as Israel (relying on international mediators) engages in negotiations with Hamas over a range of issues including the release of a captured Israeli citizen, there is no sense that its domestication strategy is working. And whatever accommodations the gatekeepers of Israel’s military-intelligence sector had in mind, the chaos unleashed by Operation Protective Edge has probably pushed Jewish Israeli society beyond the point of no return. Indeed, the wartime atmosphere proved a godsend for far-right mobilization, electrifying religious nationalist elements in the government and fascist goons in the streets of Tel Aviv. This January, the 45% of Jewish Israelis who complained that their military had not used enough force against Gaza went on to elect the most right-wing government in Israeli history.

Among the leaders of Israel’s increasingly dominant religious nationalist movement is Naftali Bennett, the 43-year-old head of the pro-settler Jewish Home Party. Bennett spent much of last summer’s war railing against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for refusing to order a full reoccupation of Gaza and the violent removal of Hamas — a potentially catastrophic move that Netanyahu and the Israeli military brass vehemently opposed. While Bennett accused Palestinians of committing “self-genocide,” his youthful deputy, Ayelet Shaked, declared that Palestinian civilians “are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads.” According to Shaked, the “mothers of the martyrs” should be exterminated, “as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.”

In the current Israeli governing coalition, Bennett serves as Minister of Education, overseeing the schooling of millions of Jewish Israeli youth. And Shaked has been promoted to Minister of Justice, giving her direct influence over the country’s court system. Once one of the young Turks of the right-wing Likud Party, Netanyahu now finds himself at the hollow center of Israeli politics, mediating between factions of hardline ethno-nationalists and outright fascists.

Where Gaza is concerned, Israel’s loyal opposition differs little from the country’s far-right rulers. In the days before the January national elections, Tzipi Livni, a leader of the left-of-center Zionist Union, proclaimed, “Hamas is a terrorist organization and there is no hope for peace with it… the only way to act against it is with force — we must use military force against terror… and this is instead of [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s policy to come to an agreement with Hamas.” Livni’s ally, Labor Party leader Isaac Herzog, reinforced her militaristic position by declaring, “There is no compromising with terror.”

Months after the cessation of hostilities, even as foreign correspondents marvel at the “quiet” that has prevailed along Gaza’s borders, the Israeli leadership is ramping up its bloody imprecations. At a conference this May sponsored by Shurat HaDin, a legal organization dedicated to defending Israel from war crimes charges, Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon warned that another crushing assault was inevitable, either in Gaza, southern Lebanon, or both. After threatening to drop a nuclear bomb on Iran, Yaalon pledged that “we are going to hurt Lebanese civilians to include kids of the family. We went through a very long deep discussion… we did it then, we did it in [the] Gaza Strip, we are going to do it in any round of hostilities in the future.”

Yaalon went on to boast to his audience about how one year before Operation Protective Edge, he furnished his commanders with maps of “certain neighborhoods in Gaza” to hit. They included Shujaiya, an area east of Gaza City where over 120 civilians were killed in a matter of hours, and which now lies in utter ruin. Gaza still reels from last summer’s assault, yet there is no reason to doubt that the Israeli military will fulfill Yaalon’s terrifying vow — perhaps sooner than anyone expects.

For Israel, war is no longer an option. It is a way of life.

Trump towers over Republicans and Democrats, Beltway goes ballistic

July 23, 2015

by Robert Bridge

RT

Donald Trump, the billionaire real estate mogul who tossed his famous brand name into the 2016 presidential race, has catapulted himself to the top of the US political dung heap by hitting a raw nerve among disenchanted voters.

Trump’s stunning success in public opinion polls – he has about twice the likeability of his nearest rival – required no huge sums of money, no inordinate political flair or genius and no Karl Rove to launch him straight into the hearts and minds of Main Street, USA, which is still awaiting reimbursement for Obama’s Hope & Change Show that never premiered as promised.

So how did Trump, who gave up hosting The Apprentice television program so he could, in his own words, “save America,” shake the US political system to its very rotting foundation? With nothing more sophisticated than child’s play, that’s how. Personal charisma and humungous ego notwithstanding, Trump simply tapped into an active volcano of anger and frustration many Americans are feeling over Washington’s astounding failure to shut down the border with Mexico – kind of like children taking a principle-based stand when tough kids from another neighborhood invade their sandbox. It’s really that simple.

But not simple enough for the Obama administration, it seems. Once safely across the Rio Grande, millions of Mexican line-jumpers are being feted at hundreds of ‘sanctuary cities’ across the country, all funded by Joe Taxpayer, of course. Not surprisingly, Americans have protested the nation’s slow-motion crack-up, yet not a single wannabe presidential candidate from the Democrat-Republican business cartel has addressed the issue. Nor has the obsequious media pressured the powers-that-be over it. So – surprise-surprise – gross political negligence and media complicity opened up a yawning vacuum for somebody like ‘The Donald’ to stand in as political midwife, delivering the baby of illegal immigration kicking and screaming into the public domain.

Naturally this begs the asinine question: Why wasn’t this glaring problem resolved before? What modern nation – to say nothing of a nuclear-armed superpower – would grant millions of illegals (11 million by Washington’s conservative count) rite of passage into its territory? Why is it that US forces can patrol halfway around the world along the Afghan-Pakistan border with drones, satellites and Special Forces – even obliterate bin Laden one messy morning – yet the Mexican border is somehow mission impossible? So was anybody really surprised when the Obama administration’s revolving-door border policy culminated in a series of deadly tragedies across the country involving illegal aliens with criminal records and innocent Americans?

Earlier this month, Kathryn Steinle, 31, was shot dead in San Francisco as she strolled with her father along the waterfront area, a popular tourist destination. Police arrested the suspected murderer, Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, a Mexican native who had accumulated seven felony convictions since 1991 and had been deported from the United States on separate occasions (!).

San Francisco authorities had just released Lopez-Sanchez from prison in April after failing to convict him on drug charges, and despite a request from the Department of Homeland Security, or DHS, that he be deported (a sixth time) to his native Mexico. Are the Feds spending so much time and energy hyperventilating about Islamic jihadists – more Americans die from lightning strikes each year by comparison – that they are ignoring a far more serious problem just over the horizon?

Trump is now pointing gleefully to such tragedies as proof that Mexico is intentionally pushing its most dangerous outlaws towards the American prairie.

One American who certainly agrees with Trump is Jamiel Shaw, whose 17-year-old son was gunned down execution-style in 2008 on the way home from the mall by an illegal alien. Shaw has taken the podium alongside Trump at rallies across the country, where he describes how his son, a promising high school football player, was taken by “invisibles” – those who are in America illegally. Shaw tells crowds that he smiled for the “first time in years” after hearing Trump’s pledge to close the border if elected.

“I felt happy for the first time,” Shaw said. “When that happened, I felt good. I felt hope. This is the hope that Obama thought he was gonna get. That was false hope.”

So with the billionaire magnate performing the political equivalent of a smash the backboard slam-dunk, it may seem natural that every establishment lackey on the East Coast is lining up to throw a cheap shot at Trump.

The popular comedian Jon Stewart, for example, has been bashing ‘Trumpizy’ regularly on his satirical political show, while giving the real estate mogul zero credit for dragging the immigration problem into the limelight. Instead, Stewart feigned shock when Trump said that many of the Mexican illegals were “criminals and rapists.”

“Why is anyone acting surprised about Trump?” Stewart asked. “The only reason you liked this guy in the first place was because of the terrible things he was willing to say about Obama.”

Trump’s meteoric rise amid a crowd of political has-beens comes as a surprise only for that out-of-touch breed of Washington insiders who have no idea what the American voter wants and needs. For example, Senator John McCain, who also found himself on the receiving end of one of Trump’s no-holds-barred verbal barrages.

“The reality is that John McCain the politician has made America less safe, sent our brave soldiers into wrong-headed foreign adventures, covered up for President Obama with the VA scandal and has spent most of his time in the Senate pushing amnesty,” Trump wrote. “He would rather protect the Iraqi border than Arizona’s.”

Trump initially attracted the ire of Republicans after saying he could not qualify McCain – a fighter pilot in the Vietnam War who spent five years as a prisoner – a war hero “because he was captured.”

If Trump can survive a steady onslaught of Stewart-style disparagement (my 50-cent prediction: he won’t; the multi-pronged attack against him will be simply too overwhelming even for Trump to withstand), then America may emerge from its political paralysis and become great again. But like so many wealthy outsiders (Ross Perot, for example) who attempted to change the US political system beyond the fiefdom of corporate power, Trump will most likely come up short in the greatest gamble of his career.

The real loser, however, will be the American people, who desperately need a progressive outsider – far beyond the rusted Beltway and corporate America’s corrupting purse – to put the country back on track.

China’s Global Ambitions, With Loans and Strings Attached

The country has invested billions in Ecuador and elsewhere, using its economic clout to win diplomatic allies and secure natural resources around the world.

July 24, 2015

by Clifford Krauss and Keith Bradsher

New York Times

EL CHACO, Ecuador — Where the Andean foothills dip into the Amazon jungle, nearly 1,000 Chinese engineers and workers have been pouring concrete for a dam and a 15-mile underground tunnel. The $2.2 billion project will feed river water to eight giant Chinese turbines designed to produce enough electricity to light more than a third of Ecuador.

Near the port of Manta on the Pacific Ocean, Chinese banks are in talks to lend $7 billion for the construction of an oil refinery, which could make Ecuador a global player in gasoline, diesel and other petroleum products.

Across the country in villages and towns, Chinese money is going to build roads, highways, bridges, hospitals, even a network of surveillance cameras stretching to the Galápagos Islands. State-owned Chinese banks have already put nearly $11 billion into the country, and the Ecuadorean government is asking for more.

Ecuador, with just 16 million people, has little presence on the global stage. But China’s rapidly expanding footprint here speaks volumes about the changing world order, as Beijing surges forward and Washington gradually loses ground.

While China has been important to the world economy for decades, the country is now wielding its financial heft with the confidence and purpose of a global superpower. With the center of financial gravity shifting, China is aggressively asserting its economic clout to win diplomatic allies, invest its vast wealth, promote its currency and secure much-needed natural resources.It represents a new phase in China’s evolution. As the country’s wealth has swelled and its needs have evolved, President Xi Jinping and the rest of the leadership have pushed to extend China’s reach on a global scale.

China’s currency, the renminbi, is expected to be anointed soon as a global reserve currency, putting it in an elite category with the dollar, the euro, the pound and the yen. China’s state-owned development bank has surpassed the World Bank in international lending. And its effort to create an internationally funded institution to finance transportation and other infrastructure has drawn the support of 57 countries, including several of the United States’ closest allies, despite opposition from the Obama administration.

Even the current stock market slump is unlikely to shake the country’s resolve. China has nearly $4 trillion in foreign currency reserves, which it is determined to invest overseas to earn a profit and exert its influence.

China’s growing economic power coincides with an increasingly assertive foreign policy. It is building aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines and stealth jets. In a contested sea, China is turning reefs and atolls near the southern Philippines into artificial islands, with at least one airstrip able to handle the largest military planes. The United States has challenged the move, conducting surveillance flights in the area and discussing plans to send warships.

China represents “a civilization and history that awakens admiration to those who know it,” President Rafael Correa of Ecuador proclaimed on Twitter, as his jet landed in Beijing for a meeting with officials in January.

China’s leaders portray the overseas investments as symbiotic. “The current industrial cooperation between China and Latin America arrives at the right moment,” Prime Minister Li Keqiang said in a visit to Chile in late May. “China has equipment manufacturing capacity and integrated technology with competitive prices, while Latin America has the demand for infrastructure expansion and industrial upgrading.”

But the show of financial strength also makes China — and the world — more vulnerable. Long an engine of global growth, China is taking on new risks by exposing itself to shaky political regimes, volatile emerging markets and other economic forces beyond its control.

Any major problems could weigh on China’s growth, particularly at a time when it is already slowing. The country’s stock market troubles this summer are only adding to the pressure, as the government moves aggressively to stabilize the situation.

While China has substantial funds to withstand serious financial shocks, its overall health matters. When China swoons, the effects are felt worldwide, by the companies, industries and economies that depend on the country as the engine of global growth.

In many cases, China is going where the West is reluctant to tread, either for financial or political reasons — or both. After getting hit with Western sanctions over the Ukraine crisis, Russia, which is on the verge of a recession, deepened ties with China. The list of borrowers in Africa and the Middle East reads like a who’s who of troubled regimes and economies that may have trouble repaying Chinese loans, including Yemen, Syria, Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe.

With its elevated status, China is forcing countries to play by its financial rules, which can be onerous. Many developing countries, in exchange for loans, pay steep interest rates and give up the rights to their natural resources for years. China has a lock on close to 90 percent of Ecuador’s oil exports, which mostly goes to paying off its loans.

“The problem is we are trying to replace American imperialism with Chinese imperialism,” said Alberto Acosta, who served as President Correa’s energy minister during his first term. “The Chinese are shopping across the world, transforming their financial resources into mineral resources and investments. They come with financing, technology and technicians, but also high interest rates.”

China also has a shaky record when it comes to worker safety, environmental standards and corporate governance. While China’s surging investments have created jobs in many countries, development experts worry that Beijing is exporting its worst practices.

Chinese mining and manufacturing operations, like many American and European companies in previous decades, have been accused of abusing workers overseas. China’s coal-fired power plants and industrial factories are adding to pollution problems in developing nations.

Issues have already surfaced in Ecuador.

A few miles from the site of the hydroelectric plant, the Coca River vaults down a 480-foot waterfall and cascades through steep canyons toward the Amazon. It is the tallest waterfall in Ecuador and popular with tourists.

When the dam is complete and the water is diverted to the plant, the San Rafael falls will slow to a trickle for part of the year. With climate change already shrinking the Andean glacier that feeds the river, experts debate whether the site will have enough water to generate even half the electricity predicted.

Ecuadoreans on the Chinese-run project have repeatedly protested about wages, health care, food and general working conditions. “The Chinese are arrogant,” said Oscar Cedeno, a 20-year-old construction worker. “They think they are superior to us.”

Last December, an underground river burst into a tunnel at the site. The high-pressure water flooded the powerhouse, killing 14 workers. It was one of a series of serious accidents at Chinese projects in Ecuador, several of them fatal.

The Rise of China

When the research arm of China’s cabinet scheduled an economic development conference this spring, the global financial and corporate elite came to Beijing. The heads of major banks and pharmaceutical, auto and oil companies mingled with top Chinese officials.

Some had large investments in the country and wanted to protect their access to the domestic market. Others came to court business, as Beijing channeled more of its money overseas.

At the event, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde, commended China’s efforts to engage globally through investment and trade, as well as to enact economic reforms. It “is good for China and good for the world — their fates are intertwined,” she said in her keynote address.

China’s pull is strong.

It is the world’s largest buyer of oil, which gives China substantial sway over petropolitics. It is also increasingly the trading partner of choice for many countries, taking the mantle from Western nations. China’s foreign direct investment — the money it spends overseas annually on land, factories and other business operations — is second only to the United States’, having passed Japan last year.

Chinese companies are at the center of a worldwide construction boom, mostly financed by Chinese banks. They are building power plants in Serbia, glass and cement factories in Ethiopia, low-income housing in Venezuela and natural gas pipelines in Uzbekistan.

This striking evolution happened in a short time.

While China made some economic progress under Mao Zedong, his policies left the country turbulent and isolated. Hundreds of thousands of people were executed after the Communist takeover in 1949, accused of opposing the revolution or owning too much land. Famine killed tens of millions starting in the late 1950s. The Cultural Revolution, beginning in 1966, unleashed a decade of violence and economic stagnation.

When China started to open its economy in the late 1970s, it was among the poorest nations. Beijing had to court companies and investors.

One of the first multinationals to enter was the American Motors Corporation, which built a factory in Beijing. The project was initially aimed at producing Jeeps for export to Australia, rather than building cars for Chinese consumers, who still largely rode bicycles.

The Chinese market seemed unimportant, said Gerald Meyers, then the chief executive of the carmaker. He didn’t even bother to visit the country. “We didn’t devote a lot of our boardroom discussions to it,” he said. “We were really trying to scrape out a living in our domestic market.”

Today, China produces two million cars a month, far more than any other country. It mirrors the broader transformation of the economy from an insular agrarian society to the world’s largest manufacturer.

The change has showered wealth on China. But it has also brought new demands, like a voracious thirst for energy to power its economy. The confluence of trends has compelled China to look beyond its borders to invest those riches and to satisfy its needs.

Oil has been on the leading edge of this investment push. Energy projects and stakes have accounted for two-fifths of China’s $630 billion of overseas investments in the last decade, according to Derek Scissors, an analyst at the American Enterprise Institute.

China is playing both defense and offense. With an increased dependence on foreign oil, China’s leadership has followed the United States and other large economies by seeking to own more overseas oil fields — or at least the crude they produce — to ensure a stable supply. In recent years, state-controlled Chinese oil companies have acquired big stakes in oil operations in Cameroon, Canada, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Iraq, Nigeria, São Tomé and Príncipe, Sudan, Uganda, the United States and Venezuela.

“When utilizing foreign resources and markets, we need to consider it from the height of national strategy,” Prime Minister Li said in 2009, when he was a vice premier. “If the resources mainly come from one country or from one place with frequent turmoil, national economic safety will be under shadow when an emergency happens.”

Road to Dependence

For President Correa of Ecuador, China represents a break with his country’s past — and his own.

His father was imprisoned in the United States for cocaine smuggling and later committed suicide. At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Mr. Correa focused his doctoral thesis on the shortcomings of economic policies backed by WShut out from borrowing in traditional markets, Ecuador turned to China to fill the void. PetroChina, the government-backed oil company, lent Petroecuador $1 billion in August 2009 for two years at 7.25 percent interest. Within a year, more Chinese money began to flow for hydroelectric and other infrastructure projects.

“What Ecuador wants are sources of capital with fewer political strings attached, and that goes back to the personal history of Rafael Correa, who holds the United States directly or indirectly responsible for his father’s death and suffering,” said R. Evan Ellis, professor of Latin American studies at the United States Army War College Strategic Studies Institute. “But there is also a desire to get away from the dependence on the fiscal and political conditions of the I.M.F., World Bank and the West.”ashington and Western banks.

As a politician, he embraced Venezuela’s socialist revolution. During his 2006 campaign, Mr. Correa joked that the Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez’s comparison of President George W. Bush with Satan was disrespectful to the devil.

In an early move as president, Mr. Correa expelled the Americans from a military base in Manta, an important launching pad for the Pentagon’s war on drugs.

“We can negotiate with the United States over a base in Manta if they let us put a military base in Miami,” President Correa said at the time.

Next, he severed financial ties. In late 2008, Mr. Correa called much of his country’s debt, largely owned by Western investors, “immoral and illegitimate” and stopped paying, setting off a default.

At that point, Ecuador was in a bind. The global financial crisis was taking hold and oil prices collapsed. Ecuador and Petroecuador, its state-owned oil company, started running low on money.

The Ecuadorean foreign minister calls the shift to China a “diversification of its foreign relations,” rather than a substitute for the United States or Europe. “We have decided that the most convenient and healthy thing for us,” said the foreign minister, Ricardo Patiño, is “to have friendly, mutually beneficial relations of respect with all countries.”

The Chinese money, though, comes with its own conditions. Along with steep interest payments, Ecuador is largely required to use Chinese companies and technologies on the projects.

International rules limit how the United States and other industrialized countries can tie their loans to such agreements. But China, which is still considered a developing country despite being the world’s largest manufacturer, doesn’t have to follow those standards.

It is one reason that China’s effort to build an international development fund, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, has faced criticism in the United States. Washington is worried that China will create its own rules, with lower expectations for transparency, governance and the environment.

While China has sought to quell those fears over the infrastructure fund, its portfolio of projects around the world imposes tough terms and sometimes lax standards. Since 2005, the country has landed $471 billion in construction contracts, many tied to broader lending agreements.

In Ecuador, a consortium of Chinese companies is overseeing a flood control and irrigation project in the southern Ecuador province of Cañar. A Chinese engineering company built a $100 million, four-lane bridge to span the Babahoyo River near the coast.

Such deals typically favor the Chinese.

PetroChina and Sinopec, another state-controlled Chinese company, together pump about 25 percent of the 560,000 barrels a day produced in Ecuador. Along with taking the bulk of oil exports, the Chinese companies also collect $25 to $50 in fees from Ecuador for each barrel they pump.

China’s terms are putting countries in precarious positions.

In Ecuador, oil represents roughly 40 percent of the government’s revenue, according to the United States Energy Department. And those earnings are suddenly plunging along with the price of oil. With crude at around $50 a barrel, Ecuador doesn’t have much left to repay its loans.

“Of course we have concerns over their ability to repay the debts — China isn’t silly,” said Lin Boqiang, the director of the Energy Economics Research Center at Xiamen University in China’s Fujian province and a government policy planner. “But the gist is resources will ultimately become valuable assets.”

If Ecuador or other countries can’t cover their debts, their obligations to China may rise. A senior Chinese banker, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity for diplomatic reasons, said Beijing would most likely restructure some loans in places like Ecuador.

To do so, Chinese authorities want to extend the length of the loans instead of writing off part of the principal. That means countries will have to hand over their natural resources for additional years, limiting their governments’ abilities to borrow money and pursue other development opportunities.

China has significant leverage to make sure borrowers pay. As the dominant manufacturer for a long list of goods, Beijing can credibly threaten to cut off shipments to countries that do not repay their loans, the senior Chinese banker said.

With its economy stumbling, Ecuador asked China at the start of the year for an additional $7.5 billion in financing to fill the growing government budget deficit and buy Chinese goods. Since then, the situation has only deteriorated. In recent weeks, thousands of protesters have poured into the streets of Quito and Guayaquil to challenge various government policies and proposals, some of which Mr. Correa has recently withdrawn.

“China is becoming the new company store for developing oil-, gas- and mineral-producing countries,” said David Goldwyn, who was the State Department’s special envoy for international energy affairs during President Obama’s first term. “They are entitled to secure reliable sources of oil, but what we need to worry about is the way they are encouraging oil-producing countries to mortgage their long-term future through oil-backed loans.”

Few of the Chinese workers speak Spanish, and they live separately from their Ecuadorean counterparts. When the workers leave their camp in the village of San Luis at noon for lunch, they walk down the main street in separate groups. At night, they also walk in separate groups up the hill to the local brothel. (Prostitution is legal in Ecuador.) The workers sit at separate tables drinking bottles of the Ecuadorean beer, Pilsener.

When the Chinese and Ecuadorean workers return to camp, typically drunk, there have been shoving matches. Once a Chinese manager threw a tray at an Ecuadorean worker at mealtime.

“You make a little mistake, and they say something like, ‘Get out of here,’ ” said Gustavo Taipe, an Ecuadorean welder. “They want to be the strongmen.”

Like other workers, Mr. Taipe, 57, works 10 consecutive days. Then he drives seven hours home to spend four days with his family, then returns for another 10 days. Mr. Taipe and others have complained about low pay for grueling work. He initially made $600 a month. After work stoppages, he now earns $914 a month, a decent wage by Ecuadorian standards.

Kevin Wang, a Chinese supervisory engineer at the project, played down the issues, saying, “Relations are friendly.” He predicted that the project would be a success. “We can do something here really important,” he said.

The hydroelectric project — led by Sinohydro, the Chinese engineering company, and financed by the Chinese Export-Import Bank — was supposed to be ready by late 2014. But the project has been plagued by problems.

A drilling rig jammed last year, suspending the excavation for a critical tunnel. Then in December, 11 Ecuadorean and three Chinese workers were killed and a dozen were hurt when an underground river burst into the tunnel and flooded the powerhouse. Workers drowned or were crushed by flying rocks and metal bars.

At a legislative hearing after the accident, one worker, Danny Tejedor, told the lawmakers, “I am a welder, and on various occasions I have been obligated to work in extreme conditions of high risk, deep in water.”

Washington, D.C. June 16, 2015: “The US is now trying to get at Russiaa by threatening to put heavy military hardware in neighboring Baltic states. Putin has, rightly, taken this as a direct threat to Russian security and has threatened to beef up Russian ICBM development in retaliation. Also, the US has been making greedy gestures to the newly-ice free Arctic regions, lusting after the oil reserves there as well as wishing to take control of the potential very valuable trade routes. Like the loud sanctions Obama fastened on Russia after the Crimean fiasco, these plans will achieve nothing but future trouble. And Greece refuses to repay EU loans and claims that it will leave the EU. No doubt, given Grecian bankruptcy and bad fiscal policies, the EU will celebrate. This is like having your nasty mother-in-law threaten to never visit you again!”

Second hack of federal records hit intelligence and military personnel

As many as 14 million current and former civilian US government employees had their personal information exposed to hackers, according to two people who were briefed on the investigation, representing a far higher figure than the 4 million the Obama administration initially disclosed – and coming amid an apparent second cyber breach that officials said was linked to China.

The newer estimates put the number of compromised records at between 9 million and 14 million going back to the 1980s, said one congressional official and one former US official, who spoke to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity because information disclosed in the confidential briefings includes classified details of the investigation.

There are about 4.2 million federal employees, so the majority of the records exposed relate to former employees. Contractor information also has been stolen, officials said.

The latest revelation came a day after a major union said the cyber theft is more damaging than it first appeared, asserting that hackers stole personnel data and social security numbers for all the federal workers in a central personnel database.

Several US officials also said hackers linked to China appear to have gained access to sensitive background information submitted by intelligence and military personnel seeking security clearances. The break is the second digital breach of federal records revealed in a week and could dramatically compound the potential damage.

The forms believed accessed, known as Standard Form 86, require applicants to fill out deeply personal information about mental illnesses, drug and alcohol use, past arrests and bankruptcies. They also require the listing of contacts and relatives, potentially exposing any foreign relatives of US intelligence employees to coercion. The applicant’s social security number and that of his or her cohabitant are required.

The officials declined to be quoted by name because the details are classified, and the Office of Personnel Management had no immediate comment.

Regarding the new user total affected by the main breach, the Obama administration had acknowledged that up to 4 million current and former employees whose information resides in the OPM server are affected by the December cyber breach, but it had been vague about exactly what was taken.

But J David Cox, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, said in a letter Thursday to OPM director Katherine Archuleta that based on incomplete information OPM provided to the union, “we believe that the Central Personnel Data File was the targeted database, and that the hackers are now in possession of all personnel data for every federal employee, every federal retiree, and up to 1 million former federal employees”.

The OPM data file contains the records of most federal civilian employees, though not members of Congress and their staffs, members of the military or staff of the intelligence agencies.

Also Thursday, Senate Democrat leader Harry Reid said that the hack was carried out by “the Chinese” without specifying whether he meant the Chinese government or individuals. Reid is one of eight lawmakers briefed on the most secret intelligence information. US officials have declined to publicly blame China, which has denied involvement.

The union, which does not have direct access to the investigation, said it is basing its assessment on “sketchy” information provided by OPM. The agency has sought to downplay the damage, saying what was taken “could include” personnel file information such as social security numbers and birth dates.

“We believe that social security numbers were not encrypted, a cybersecurity failure that is absolutely indefensible and outrageous,” Cox said in the letter. The union called the breach “an abysmal failure on the part of the agency to guard data that has been entrusted to it by the federal workforce”.

Samuel Schumach, an OPM spokesman, said that “for security reasons, we will not discuss specifics of the information that might have been compromised”.

Schumach did, however, address Cox’s comment on encryption. “Though data encryption is a valuable protection method, today’s adversaries are sophisticated enough that encryption alone does not guarantee protection,” he said. “OPM does utilize encryption in some instances and is currently increasing the types of methods utilized to encrypt data.”

The central personnel data file contains up to 780 separate pieces of information about an employee.

Cox complained in the letter that “very little substantive information has been shared with us, despite the fact that we represent more than 670,000 federal employees in departments and agencies throughout the executive branch”.

The union’s release and Reid’s comment in the Senate put into sharper focus what is looking like a massive cyber espionage success by China. Republican senator Susan Collins, an intelligence committee member, has also said the hack came from China.

Mike Rogers, the former chairman of the House intelligence committee, said last week that Chinese intelligence agencies have for some time been seeking to assemble a database of information about Americans. Those personal details can be used for blackmail, or also to shape bogus emails designed to appear legitimate while injecting spyware on the networks of government agencies or businesses Chinese hackers are trying to penetrate.

US intelligence officials say China, like the US, spies for national security advantage. Unlike the US, they say, China also engages in large-scale theft of corporate secrets for the benefit of state-sponsored enterprises that compete with Western companies. Nearly every major US company has been hacked from China, they say.

Greece contagion sweeps euro zone bond markets, hits shares

June 15, 2015

by Nigel Stephenson

Reuters

LONDON | Global financial markets suffered their first bout of significant contagion from the Greek crisis this year on Monday after 11th hour talks between the near bankrupt country and its creditors collapsed.

After weeks of minor ebbs and flows on the stop-start negotiations, bond markets across the euro zone signaled alarm that a deal may not be reached by mid-year, when Athens must repay 1.6 billion euros ($1.8 billion) to the International Monetary Fund.

The premium investors demand to hold Spanish, Italian and Portuguese government bonds over low-risk German Bunds hit 2015 highs, with the 10-year yield gap between Spanish and German debt touching its widest since August.

Shares in Europe and Asia fell, led lower by banks.

The euro weakened against the dollar, pressured also by investor anxiety ahead of a U.S. Federal Reserve interest rate-setting meeting later this week.

U.S. stock index futures ESc1 were down 0.5 percent, suggesting Wall Street would extend Friday’s declines, which were blamed on worries over Greece and the Fed meeting.

Talks on Sunday between Greece and its creditors, described as a last attempt to bridge their differences, broke up after less than an hour.

European Union officials said Athens had offered no new concessions to secure the funding it needs. Athens said it would not give in to demands for more pension and wage cuts.

Greece has already been bailed out twice and many banks have cut their exposure to the country while euro zone authorities have put in place mechanisms to limit contagion. However, the prospect of default and the possibility of Athens leaving the euro weighed heavily on sentiment on Monday.

“If Greece leaves the euro zone, euro zone participation will no longer be irreversible. Euro zone participation may even become an issue in elections in other euro countries where euroskeptic parties are gaining ground, such as in Spain later this year,” said Ruth van de Belt, investment strategist at Kempen Capital Management.

EURO DOWN

The pan-European FTSEurofirst 300 .FTEU3 stock index fell 1.3 percent and a gauge of European stock market volatility .V2TX hit its highest since Jan. 22, days before the left-wing Syriza party of Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras won power in a parliamentary election.

Banks in Spain, Italy and Portugal were among the big losers, with Italy’s Banco Monte dei Paschi (BMPS.MI) down 4.5 percent and Spain’s Banco Popular (POP.MC) down 4.1 percent and Portuguese Millennium bcp (BCP.LS) down 5 percent.

Solid U.S. data last week reinforced expectations that the Fed is on track to raise rates, possibly as soon as September. Investors will focus on any changes in Fed Chair Janet Yellen’s language in a post-meeting news conference.

The euro was down 0.5 percent at $1.1208, recovering from a low of $1.1188. Euro/dollar one-month volatility, a gauge of how sharp swings in the exchange rate are expected to be, hit its highest for 3-1/2 years.

The single currency also hit its lowest in nearly two weeks against the Swiss franc, before recovering.

Euro weakness helped push the dollar 0.4 percent higher against a basket of major currencies .DXY.

Oil fell as the dollar firmed. Brent crude LCOc1 lost $1.3 a barrel to $62.57. Gold was steady at $1,180.60 an ounce.

(Additonal reporting by Jamie McGeever, Emelia Sithole-Matarise and Sudip Kar-Gupta in London, Lisa Twaronite in Tokyo; editing by John Stonestreet)

The Anne Frank Diary Fraudby Brian Harring –

When Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, she did so prompted by the highest of motives. Yet she, herself, relates the incident that when she first met Abraham Lincoln in 1863, he commented “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!”

Few will deny that the printed word in this instance fanned the flames of passion which brought about one of the bloodiest and saddest wars of American history, with brother sometimes pitted against brother, father against son. Perhaps if there had been less appeal to the emotions the problems might have resolved themselves through peaceful means. However, almost universally read at the time, few people then recognized the potency of one small book or the injustice done the South through its wide acceptance as a fair picture of slavery in the South.

Propaganda, as a weapon of psychological warfare is in even wider use today. Communists were masters of the art. Often they used the direct approach; just as often they employed diversion tactics to focus the eyes and ears of the world in directions other than where the real conflict was being waged. For many years, through propaganda alone, the dead threat of Hitler and Nazism had been constantly held before the public in a diversion maneuver to keep attention from being directed against the live threat of Stalin, Khrushchev and Communism.

Such has been the effect, if not the deliberate intention of many who have promoted its distribution, of a book of popular appeal-The Diary Of Anne Frank. It has been sold to the public as the actual diary of a young Jewish girl who died in a Nazi concentration camp after two years of abuse and horror.

Many Americans have read the book or seen the movie version, and have been deeply moved by the real life drama it claims to present. But have we been misled in the belief that Anne Frank actually wrote this diary? And if so. should an author be permitted to produce a work of fiction and sell it to the world as fact, particularly one of such tremendous emotional appeal?

The Swedish journal Frio Ord published two articles commenting on The Diary of Anne Frank. A condensation of these articles appeared in the April 15, 1959 issue of Economic Council Letter, as follows:

“History has many examples of myths that live a longer and richer life than truth. and may become more effective than truth.

The Western world has for some years hem made aware of a young Jewish girl through the medium of what purports to he her personally written story, “Anne Frank’s Diary.” Any informed literary inspection of this book has shown it to have been impossible as the work of a teenager.

A noteworthy decision of the New York Supreme Court confirms this point of view, in that the well known American writer, Meyer Levin, has been awarded $50.000 to be paid him by the father of Anne Frank as an honorarium for Levin’s work on the “Anne Frank Diary.”

Mr. Frank, in Switzerland, had promised to pay to prominent Jewish author, Meyer Levin. not less than $50,000 because he had used the literary creation of author Levin in toto, and represented it to his publisher and the public as his late daughter’s original work.

Inquiry of the County Clerk. New York County. as to the facts of the case referred to in the Swedish press, brought a reply on April 23, 1962, giving the name of a New York firm of lawyers as “attorneys .far the respondent.” Reference was to ”The Dairy of Anne Frank 2203-58.”

A letter to this firm brought a response on May 4, 1962 that “Although we represent Mr. Levin in other matters, we had nothing to do with the Anne Frank case.”

On May 7, 1962, came the following reply from a member of a firm of New York lawyers to whom the original inquiry had been forwarded:

“I was the attorney for Meyer Levin in his action against Otto Frank and others. It is true that a jury awarded Mr. Levin $50,000 in damages, as indicated in your letter. That award was later set aside by the trial justice. Hon. Samuel C. Coleman. on the ground that the damages had not been proved in the manner required by law. The action was subsequently settled between the litigating parties, while an appeal from Judge Coleman’s decision was pending.

I am afraid that the case itself is not officially reported, so far as the trial itself, or even Judge Coleman’s decision, is concerned. Certain procedural matters were reported. both in 141 New York Supplement. Second Series 170. and in 5 Second Series 181. The correct file number in the New York County Clerk‘s office is 2241-1956 and the file is probably a large and full one which must include Judge Coleman’s decision. Unfortunately, our file is in storage and 1 cannot locate a copy of that decision as it appeared in the New York Law Journal early in the year 1960.”

The Diary Of Anne Frank was first published in 1952 and immediately became a bestseller. It has been republished in paperback, 40 printings. It is impossible to estimate how many people have been touched and aroused by the movie production.

Why has the trial involving the father of Anne Frank, bearing directly on the authenticity of this book, never been “officially reported”? In royalties alone, Otto Frank has profited richly from the sale of this book, purporting to depict the tragic life of his daughter. But is it fact, or is it fiction? Is it truth or is it propaganda? Or is it a combination of all of these? And to what degree does it wrongfully appeal to the emotions through a misrepresentation as to its origin?

School publications for years have recommended this book for young people, presenting it as the work of Anne Frank. Advertising in advance of the movie showing has played up the “factual” nature of the drama being presented. Do not writers of such editorials and promoters of such advertising, “fan the flames of hate” they rightly profess to deplore?

Many American Jews were shocked at the handling of the Eichmann case, the distortions contained in the book Exodus and its movie counterpart, but their protests have had little publicity outside of their own organ, Issues, by the American Council for Judaism. Others who have expressed the same convictions have been charged with anti-Semitism. Yet it is to be noted that both Otto Frank and his accuser Meyer Levin, were Jewish, so a similar charge would hardly be applicable in pursuing this subject to an honest conclusion..

File number 2241-1956 in the New York County Clerk’s office should be opened to the public view and its content thoroughly publicized. Misrepresentation, exaggeration, and falsification has too often colored the judgment of good citizens. If Mr. Frank used the work of Meyer Levin to present to the world what we have been led to believe is the literary work of his daughter, wholly or in part, then the truth should be exposed.

To label fiction as fact is never justified nor should it be condoned.

Since actual period documentation does not exist in support of the Holocaust myth, it has always been incumbent on its supporters to create it.

Not only is the “Anne Frank” diary now considered to be a fake, so also is “The Painted Bird” by Jerzy Kosinski. This book, which is a mass of pornographic and sadistic imagery which, had it not been taken so seriously by the Jewish community, would be merely the pathetic manifestation of a self-serving and very sick person.

This was duly exposed as a shabby, though much revered (by the Jewish community) and quoted, fraud. When this was exposed, Kosinski committed suicide. Later, in Kosinski’s footsteps we find the next fiction entitled “Fragments, ” by a Swiss Protestant named Bruno Dosseker who spent the war in Switzerland as a young child. Dosseker posed as a very young Baltic Jewish concentration camp inmate named Binjamin Wilkomerski. This work consists of allegedly fragmented “memories” and is very difficult to read

Dosseker became the poster boy for the Holocaust supporters and was lionized by the international Jewish community, reaping considerable profit and many in-house awards for his wonderful and moving portrayal of German brutality and sexual sadism.

Another book, allegedly by a Hungarian doctor, concerning his deportation from Budapest in 1944 and subsequent journey by “Death Train” to Auschwitz is another fraud. There was never such a doctor in Hungary during the period involved and the alleged route of the train from Budapest to Auschwitz did not exist.

These sort of pathetic refugees from the back wards seem to be drawn to the Holocausters…and they to them. There are now “Holocaust Survivors” as young as thirty which is an interesting anomaly because the last concentration camp was closed in 1945. Perhaps they consider the last frenzied spring sale at Bloomingdale’s department store to be what they survived.

Next we can expect to see a book based on twenty-seven volumes of secret diaries prepared on a modern word processor within the current year by an alleged inhabitant of the Warsaw ghetto, describing the Nazi slaughter of tens of millions of weeping Jews by means that would shame a modern African state.

And, predictably, the publication of these howlers would be greeted with joy on the part of the fund raisers and fanatics, praised in the columns of the New York Times and scripted by Steven Spielberg for a heart-wrenching and guaranteed Oscar-winning film.

Hundreds of thousands of DVD copies will be donated to American schools and the Jewish community will demand that subservient executive and legislative bodies in America create a Day of Atonement as a National Holiday to balance the terrible Christian Christmas and the wickedly Satanic Halloween.

Conservationists must hate these books because so many otherwise beautiful and useful trees are slaughtered for their preparation

Insofar as the Anne Frank diary is concerned, herewith is some background on Anne Frank, her family and her alleged Diary.

The Franks were upper class German Jews, both coming from wealthy families. Otto and his siblings lived on the exclusive Meronstrasse in Frankfurt. Otto attended a private prep school, and also attended the Lessing Gymnasium, the most expensive school in Frankfurt.

Otto attended Heidelberg University. After graduation he left for a long vacation in England.

In 1909, the 20 year old Otto went to New York City where he stayed with his relatives, the Oppenheimers.

In 1925 Anne’s parents married and settled in Frankfurt, Germany. Anne was born in 1929. The Frank’s family business included banking, management of the springs at Bad Soden and the manufacture of cough drops. Anne’s mother, the former Edith Holländer, was the daughter of a manufacturer.

In 1934, Otto and his family moved to Amsterdam where he bought a spice business, Opekta, which manufactures Pectin used in making household jellies.

On May 1940, after the Germans occupied Amsterdam Otto remained in that city while his mother and brother moved to Switzerland. Otto remained in Amsterdam where his firm did business with the German Wehrmacht. From 1939 to 1944, Otto sold Opeka, and Pectin, to the German army. Pectin was a food preservative, and a anti infectant balm for wounds and as a thickener for raising blood volume in blood transfusions. Pectin was used as an emulsifier for petroleum, gelatized gasoline for fire bombing. By supplying the Wehrmacht, Otto Frank became, in the eyes of the Dutch, a Nazi collaborator.

On July 6, 1942 Otto moved the Frank family into the so-called ‘Secret Annex’. The annex is a three story, mostly glass townhouse that shares a garden park with fifty other apartments.

While he was allegedly in hiding, Otto Frank still managed his business, going downstairs to his office at night and on weekends. Anne and the others would go to Otto’s office and listen to radio broadcasts from England.

The purported diary begins on June 12, 1942, and runs to December 5,1942 . It consists of a book that is six by four by a quarter inches. In addition to this first diary, Anne supplemented it with personal letters. Otto said Anne heard Gerrit Bolkestein in a broadcast say: ~ “Keep a diary, and he would publish after the war”, and that’s why Anne’s father claimed she rewrote her diaries second time in 1944.

In this second edition, the new writer changed, rearranged and occasionally combined entries of various dates.

When Anne allegedly rewrote the diaries, she used a ball point pen, which did not exist in 1945, and the book took on an extremely high literary standard, and read more like a professional documentary than a child’s diary. In Anne’s second edition her writing style, and handwriting, suddenly matured.

The actual diary of Anne Frank contained only about 150 notes, according to The New York Times, of October 2 ,1955.

In 1944, German authorities in occupied Holland determined that Otto Frank had been swindling then via his extensive and very lucrative Wehrmacht contracts. The German police then raided his apartment attic, and the eight Jews were sent to Westerbork work camp and forced to perform manual labor .Otto himself was sent to Auschwitz.. Anne, her sister Margot, and her mother, subsequently died of typhus in another camp.

In 1945, after being liberated from German custody, Otto returned to Amsterdam, where he claimed he found Anne’s diary cleverly hidden in the Annex’s rafters. However, another version has a Dutch friend, Meip Geis finding Anne’s diary of fictional events, which she then gave to Otto Frank.

Otto took what he claimed were Anne’s letters and notes, edited them into a book, which he then gave to his secretary, Isa Cauvern, to review. Isa Cauvern and her husband Albert Cauvern , a writer, authored the first diary.

Questions were raised by some publishers as to whether Isa and Albert Cauvern, who assisted Otto in typing out the work used the original diaries or whether they took it directly from Mr. Frank’s personal transcription.

American author, Meyer Levin wrote the third and final edition

Meyer Levin was an author, and journalist, who lived for many years in France, where he met Otto Frank around 1949.

Born in 1905, Meyer Levin was raised in the section of Chicago notoriously known in the days of gangster warfare as the “Bloody Nineteen Ward.” At the age of eighteen he worked as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News and during the next four years became an increasingly frequent contributor to the national literary magazine, The Menorah Journal. In 1929 he published THE REPORTER, which was the first of his sixteen novels.

In 1933 Levin became an assistant editor and film critic at the newly-created Esquire Magazine where he remained until 1939.

Perhaps his best-known work is COMPULSION (1956), chronicling the Leopold and Loeb case and hailed by critics as one of the greatest books of the decade. The compelling work was the first “documentary novel” or “non-fiction novel.”

After the enormous success of COMPULSION, Levin embarked on a trilogy of novels dealing with the Holocaust. The first, EVA (1959) was the story of a Jewish girl’s experiences throughout the war and her adjustment to life after the concentration camps. This was followed by THE FANATIC (1963), which told the hypnotic story of a Jewish poet dealing with the moral questions that arose from his ordeal at the hands of the Nazis. The last in the triptych, THE STRONGHOLD (1965), is a thriller set in a concentration camp during the last days of the war.

At the outset of World War II Levin made documentary films for the US Office of War Information and later worked in France as a civilian expert in the Psychological Warfare Division. He eventually became a war correspondent for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, with the special mission of uncovering the fate of Jewish concentration camp prisoners. Levin took his role very seriously, sometimes entering concentration camps ahead of the tanks of the liberating forces in order to compile lists of the survivors.

After the war Levin went to Palestine and turned his attention again to the motion picture camera. His film MY FATHER’S HOUSE told the story of a child survivor searching for his family in Palestine. He wrote this story as a novel as well and the book was published in 1947.

Levin also joined the Hagana underground and helped smuggle Jews from the interior of Poland to Palestine, then basically an Arab country under the control of the British..

In 1951 Levin came upon a copy of the French edition of the Anne Frank diary He made a number of attempts to have the work published in English, and conceived it as a play and film. When the diary finally found an American publisher, his play was accepted for production but then suddenly barred, ostensibly for being “unstageworthy,” and another writer’s version was commissioned.

Levin fought for the rights to perform his version of the play, claiming that the real reason the producers refused to stage his work was because they thought it “too Jewish.” He saw the suppression of the play as an extension of the Stalinist attack on Jewish culture and, outraged that even Anne Frank could be censored, he took the producers to court and began an agonizing, prolonged struggle that dragged on for years.

Levin eventually won a jury award against the producers for appropriation of ideas, but the bitterness of the trial made him many enemies in the Jewish and literary communities.

Although Levin’s version of the play is still banned by the owners of the dramatic rights, underground productions of the work are frequently staged throughout the world.

Meyer Levin died in 1981

Levin rewrote the various post-war treatments of the Anne Frank diary with an eye toward a Broadway production, but Otto decided to cut him out, refusing to honor his contract or pay him for his work. Meyer Levin sued Otto Frank for his writings, and the New York Supreme court awarded Meyer Levin $50,000, for his ‘intellectual work’.

In 1980, Otto sued two Germans, Ernst Romer and Edgar Geiss, for distributing literature denouncing the diary as a forgery. The trial produced a study by official German handwriting experts that determined everything in the diary was written by the same person. The person that wrote the diaries had used a ballpoint pen throughout. Unfortunately for Herr Frank, the ballpoint pen was not available until 1951 whereas Anne was known to have died of typhus in 1944.

Because of the lawsuit in a German court, the German state forensic bureau, the Bundes Kriminal Amt [BKA] forensically examined the manuscript, which at that point in time consisted of three hardbound notebooks and 324 loose pages bound in a fourth notebook, with special forensic equipment.

The results of tests, performed at the BKA laboratories, showed that “significant” portions of the work, especially the fourth volume, were written with a ballpoint pen. Since ballpoint pens were not available before 1951, the BKA concluded those sections must have been added subsequently.

In the end, BKA clearly determined that none of the diary handwriting matched known examples of Anne’s handwriting. The German magazine, Der Spiegel, published an account of this report alleging that (a) some editing postdated 1951; (b) an earlier expert had held that all the writing in the journal was by the same hand; and thus (c) the entire diary was a postwar fake.

The BKA information, at the urgent request of the Jewish community, was redacted at the time but later inadvertently released to researchers in the United States\

Exclusive: Watchdogs shocked at ‘disconnect’ between doctors who oversaw interrogation and guidelines that gave CIA director power over medical ethics

June 15, 2015

by Spencer Ackerman

The Guardian

Central Intelligence Agency had explicit guidelines for “human experimentation” before, during and after its post-9/11 torture of terrorism detainees, the Guardian has learned, which raise new questions about the limits on internal oversight over the agency’s in-house and contracted medical research.

The guidelines, published here for the first time, were still in effect during the lifespan of the agency’s controversial interrogation program

Sections of a previously classified CIA document, made public by the Guardian on Monday, empower the agency’s director to “approve, modify, or disapprove all proposals pertaining to human subject research”. The leeway provides the director, who has never in the agency’s history been a medical doctor, with significant influence over limitations the US government sets to preserve safe, humane and ethical procedures on people.

CIA director George Tenet approved abusive interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, designed by CIA contractor psychologists. He further instructed the agency’s health personnel to oversee the brutal interrogations – the beginning of years of controversy, still ongoing, about US torture as a violation of medical ethics.

But the revelation of the guidelines has prompted critics of CIA torture to question how the agency could have ever implemented what it calls “enhanced interrogation techniques” – despite apparently having rules against “research on human subjects” without their informed consent.

Indeed, despite the lurid name, doctors, human-rights workers and intelligence experts consulted by the Guardian said the agency’s human-experimentation rules were consistent with responsible medical practices. The CIA, however, redacted one of the four subsections on human experimentation.

“The more words you have, the more you can twist them, but it’s not a bad definition,” said Scott Allen, an internist and medical adviser to Physicians for Human Rights.

The agency confirmed to the Guardian that the document was still in effect during the lifespan of the controversial rendition, detention and interrogation program.

After reviewing the document, one watchdog said the timeline suggested the CIA manipulated basic definitions of human experimentation to ensure the torture program proceeded.

“Crime one was torture. The second crime was research without consent in order to say it wasn’t torture,” said Nathaniel Raymond, a former war-crimes investigator with Physicians for Human Rights and now a researcher with Harvard University’s Humanitarian Initiative.

The document containing the guidelines, dated 1987 but updated over the years and still in effect at the CIA, was obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the ACLU and shared with the Guardian, which is publishing it for the first time.

The relevant section of the CIA document, “Law and Policy Governing the Conduct of Intelligence Agencies”, instructs that the agency “shall not sponsor, contract for, or conduct research on human subjects” outside of instructions on responsible and humane medical practices set for the entire US government by its Department of Health and Human Services.

A keystone of those instructions, the document notes, is the “subject’s informed consent”.

That language echoes the public, if obscure, language of Executive Order 12333 – the seminal, Reagan-era document spelling out the powers and limitations of the intelligence agencies, including rules governing surveillance by the National Security Agency. But the discretion given to the CIA director to “approve, modify, or disapprove all proposals pertaining to human subject research” has not previously been public.

The entire 41-page CIA document exists to instruct the agency on what Executive Order 12333 permits and prohibits, after legislative action in the 1970s curbed intelligence powers in response to perceived abuses – including the CIA’s old practice of experimenting on human beings through programs like the infamous MK-Ultra project, which, among other things, dosed unwitting participants with LSD as an experiment.

The previously unknown section of the guidelines empower the CIA director and an advisory board on “human subject research” to “evaluate all documentation and certifications pertaining to human research sponsored by, contracted for, or conducted by the CIA”.

Experts assessing the document for the Guardian said the human-experimentation guidelines were critical to understanding the CIA’s baseline view of the limits of its medical research – limits they said the agency and its medical personnel violated during its interrogations, detentions and renditions program after 9/11.

The presence of medical personnel during brutal interrogations of men like Abu Zubaydah, they said, was difficult to reconcile with both the CIA’s internal requirement of “informed consent” on human experimentation subjects and responsible medical practices.

The OMS doctors were heavily involved in the torture of detainees in CIA custody. They advised interrogators on the physical and psychological administration of what the agency called “enhanced interrogation techniques”. After observation, the doctors offered perspectives on calibrating them to specific detainees’ resilience.

The CIA, which does not formally concede that it tortured people, insists that the presence of medical personnel ensured its torture techniques were conducted according to medical rigor. Several instances in the Senate torture report, partially declassified six months ago, record unease among OMS staff with their role in interrogations.

But other physicians and human rights experts who have long criticized the role of medical staff in torture said the extensive notes from CIA doctors on the interrogations – as they unfolded – brought OMS into the realm of human experimentation, particularly as they helped blur the lines between providing medical aid to detainees and keeping them capable of enduring further abusive interrogations.

Doctors take oaths to guarantee they inflict no harm on their patients.

Zubaydah “seems very resistant to the water board”, an OMS official emailed in August 2002. “No useful information so far … He did vomit a couple of times during the water board with some beans and rice. It’s been 10 hours since he ate so this is surprising and disturbing. We plan to only feed Ensure for a while now. I’m head[ing] back for another water board session.”

Doctors and intelligence experts said they could imagine legitimate, non-abusive CIA uses for human experimentation.

Steven Aftergood, a scholar of the intelligence agencies with the Federation of American Scientists, suggested that the agency might need to study polygraph effects on its agents; evaluate their performance under conditions of stress; or study physiological indicators of deception.

But all said that such examples of human experimentation would require something that the CIA never had during the interrogation program: the informed consent of its subjects.

“There is a disconnect between the requirement of this regulation and the conduct of the interrogation program,” said Aftergood. “They do not represent consistent policy.”

“[A]ppropriate medical or psychological personnel must be on site during all detainee interrogations employing Enhanced Techniques,” Tenet wrote in January 2003. “In each case, the medical and psychological staff shall suspend the interrogation if they determine that significant and prolonged physical or mental injury, pain or suffering is likely to result if the interrogation is not suspended.”

In response to the Guardian’s questions about the newly disclosed document and its implications for the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program, CIA spokesperson Ryan Trapani provided the following statement:

“CIA has had internal guidelines interpreting Executive Order 1233 in place continuously from 1987 to present. While some provisions in these guidelines have been amended since September 11, 2001, none of those amendments changed provisions governing human experimentation or were made in response to the detention and interrogation program.”

Ironically, the only part of the CIA’s torture program in which agency officials claimed they were hamstrung by prohibitions on human experimentation is when they were asked by John Helgerson, their internal inspector general, if torture was effective.

Their response was framed as an example of the agency respecting its own prohibition on human experimentation. In more recent days, the CIA has used it as a cudgel against the Senate report’s extensive conclusions that the torture was ultimately worthless.

“[S]ystematic study over time of the effectiveness of the techniques would have been encumbered by a number of factors,” reads a CIA response given to Helgerson in June 2003, a point the agency reiterated in its formal response to the Senate intelligence committee. Among them: “Federal policy on the protection of human subjects.”

Harvard’s Raymond, using the agency’s acronym for its “enhanced interrogation technique” euphemism, said the CIA must have known its guidelines on human experimentation ruled out its psychologist-designed brutal interrogations.

“If they were abiding by this policy when EIT came up, they wouldn’t have been allowed to do it,” Raymond said. “Anyone in good faith would have known that was human subject research.”

The Truth About Diego Garcia: And 50 Years of Fiction About an American Military Base

by David Vine

TomDispatch

First, they tried to shoot the dogs. Next, they tried to poison them with strychnine. When both failed as efficient killing methods, British government agents and U.S. Navy personnel used raw meat to lure the pets into a sealed shed. Locking them inside, they gassed the howling animals with exhaust piped in from U.S. military vehicles. Then, setting coconut husks ablaze, they burned the dogs’ carcasses as their owners were left to watch and ponder their own fate.

The truth about the U.S. military base on the British-controlled Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia is often hard to believe. It would be easy enough to confuse the real story with fictional accounts of the island found in the Transformers movies, on the television series 24, and in Internet conspiracy theories about the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.

While the grim saga of Diego Garcia frequently reads like fiction, it has proven all too real for the people involved. It’s the story of a U.S. military base built on a series of real-life fictions told by U.S. and British officials over more than half a century. The central fiction is that the U.S. built its base on an “uninhabited” island. That was “true” only because the indigenous people were secretly exiled from the Chagos Archipelago when the base was built. Although their ancestors had lived there since the time of the American Revolution, Anglo-American officials decided, as one wrote, to “maintain the fiction that the inhabitants of Chagos [were] not a permanent or semi-permanent population,” but just “transient contract workers.” The same official summed up the situation bluntly: “We are able to make up the rules as we go along.”

And so they did: between 1968 and 1973, American officials conspired with their British colleagues to remove the Chagossians, carefully hiding their expulsion from Congress, Parliament, the U.N., and the media. During the deportations, British agents and members of a U.S. Navy construction battalion rounded up and killed all those pet dogs. Their owners were then deported to the western Indian Ocean islands of Mauritius and the Seychelles, 1,200 miles from their homeland, where they received no resettlement assistance. More than 40 years after their expulsion, Chagossians generally remain the poorest of the poor in their adopted lands, struggling to survive in places that outsiders know as exotic tourist destinations.

During the same period, Diego Garcia became a multi-billion-dollar Navy and Air Force base and a central node in U.S. military efforts to control the Greater Middle East and its oil and natural gas supplies. The base, which few Americans are aware of, is more important strategically and more secretive than the U.S. naval base-cum-prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Unlike Guantánamo, no journalist has gotten more than a glimpse of Diego Garcia in more than 30 years. And yet, it has played a key role in waging the Gulf War, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, and the current bombing campaign against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.

Following years of reports that the base was a secret CIA “black site” for holding terrorist suspects and years of denials by U.S. and British officials, leaders on both sides of the Atlantic finally fessed up in 2008. “Contrary to earlier explicit assurances,” said Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs David Miliband, Diego Garcia had indeed played at least some role in the CIA’s secret “rendition” program.

Last year, British officials claimed that flight log records, which might have shed light on those rendition operations, were “incomplete due to water damage” thanks to “extremely heavy weather in June 2014.” A week later, they suddenly reversed themselves, saying that the “previously wet paper records have been dried out.” Two months later, they insisted the logs had not dried out at all and were “damaged to the point of no longer being useful.” Except that the British government’s own weather data indicates that June 2014 was an unusually dry month on Diego Garcia. A legal rights advocate said British officials “could hardly be less credible if they simply said ‘the dog ate my homework.’”

And these are just a few of the fictions underlying the base that occupies the Chagossians’ former home and that the U.S. military has nicknamed the “Footprint of Freedom.” After more than four decades of exile, however, with a Chagossian movement to return to their homeland growing, the fictions of Diego Garcia may finally be crumbling.

No “Tarzans”

The story of Diego Garcia begins in the late eighteenth century. At that time, enslaved peoples from Africa, brought to work on Franco-Mauritian coconut plantations, became the first settlers in the Chagos Archipelago. Following emancipation and the arrival of indentured laborers from India, a diverse mixture of peoples created a new society with its own language, Chagos Kreol. They called themselves the Ilois — the Islanders.

While still a plantation society, the archipelago, by then under British colonial control, provided a secure life featuring universal employment and numerous social benefits on islands described by many as idyllic. “That beautiful atoll of Diego Garcia, right in the middle of the ocean,” is how Stuart Barber described it in the late 1950s. A civilian working for the U.S. Navy, Barber would become the architect of one of the most powerful U.S. military bases overseas.

Amid Cold War competition with the Soviet Union, Barber and other officials were concerned that there was almost no U.S. military presence in and around the Indian Ocean. Barber noted that Diego Garcia’s isolation — halfway between Africa and Indonesia and 1,000 miles south of India — ensured that it would be safe from attack, yet was still within striking distance of territory from southern Africa and the Middle East to South and Southeast Asia.

Guided by Barber’s idea, the administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson convinced the British government to detach the Chagos Archipelago from colonial Mauritius and create a new colony, which they called the British Indian Ocean Territory. Its sole purpose would be to house U.S. military facilities.

During secret negotiations with their British counterparts, Pentagon and State Department officials insisted that Chagos come under their “exclusive control (without local inhabitants),” embedding an expulsion order in a polite-looking parenthetical phrase. U.S. officials wanted the islands “swept” and “sanitized.” British officials appeared happy to oblige, removing a people one official called “Tarzans” and, in a racist reference to Robinson Crusoe, “Man Fridays.”

“Absolutely Must Go”

This plan was confirmed with an “exchange of notes” signed on December 30, 1966, by U.S. and British officials, as one of the State Department negotiators told me, “under the cover of darkness.” The notes effectively constituted a treaty but required no Congressional or Parliamentary approval, meaning that both governments could keep their plans hidden.

According to the agreement, the United States would gain use of the new colony “without charge.” This was another fiction. In confidential minutes, the United States agreed to secretly wipe out a $14 million British military debt, circumventing the need to ask Congress for funding. In exchange, the British agreed to take the “administrative measures” necessary for “resettling the inhabitants.”

Those measures meant that, after 1967, any Chagossians who left home for medical treatment or a routine vacation in Mauritius were barred from returning. Soon, British officials began restricting the flow of food and medical supplies to Chagos. As conditions deteriorated, more islanders began leaving. By 1970, the U.S. Navy had secured funding for what officials told Congress would be an “austere communications station.” They were, however, already planning to ask for additional funds to expand the facility into a much larger base. As the Navy’s Office of Communications and Cryptology explained, “The communications requirements cited as justification are fiction.” By the 1980s, Diego Garcia would become a billion-dollar garrison.

In briefing papers delivered to Congress, the Navy described Chagos’s population as “negligible,” with the islands “for all practical purposes… uninhabited.” In fact, there were around 1,000 people on Diego Garcia in the 1960s and 500 to 1,000 more on other islands in the archipelago. With Congressional funds secured, the Navy’s highest-ranking admiral, Elmo Zumwalt, summed up the Chagossians’ fate in a 1971 memo of exactly three words: “Absolutely must go.”

The authorities soon ordered the remaining Chagossians — generally allowed no more than a single box of belongings and a sleeping mat — onto overcrowded cargo ships destined for Mauritius and the Seychelles. By 1973, the last Chagossians were gone.

“Abject Poverty”

At their destinations, most of the Chagossians were literally left on the docks, homeless, jobless, and with little money. In 1975, two years after the last removals, a Washington Post reporter found them living in “abject poverty.”

Aurélie Lisette Talate was one of the last to go. “I came to Mauritius with six children and my mother,” she told me. “We got our house… but the house didn’t have a door, didn’t have running water, didn’t have electricity. And then my children and I began to suffer. All my children started getting sick.”

Within two months, two of her children were dead. The second was buried in an unmarked grave because she lacked money for a proper burial. Aurélie experienced fainting spells herself and couldn’t eat. “We were living like animals. Land? We had none… Work? We had none. Our children weren’t going to school.”

Today, most Chagossians, who now number more than 5,000, remain impoverished. In their language, their lives are ones of lamizer (impoverished misery) and sagren (profound sorrow and heartbreak over being exiled from their native lands). Many of the islanders attribute sickness and even death to sagren. “I had something that had been affecting me for a long time, since we were uprooted,” was the way Aurélie explained it to me. “This sagren, this shock, it was this same problem that killed my child. We weren’t living free like we did in our natal land.”

Struggling for Justice

From the moment they were deported, the Chagossians demanded to be returned or at least properly resettled. After years of protest, including five hunger strikes led by women like Aurélie Talate, some in Mauritius received the most modest of compensation from the British government: small concrete houses, tiny plots of land, and about $6,000 per adult. Many used the money to pay off large debts they had accrued. For most, conditions improved only marginally. Those living in the Seychelles received nothing.

The Chagossian struggle was reinvigorated in 1997 with the launching of a lawsuit against the British government. In November 2000, the British High Court ruled the removal illegal. In 2001 and 2002, most Chagossians joined new lawsuits in both American and British courts demanding the right to return and proper compensation for their removal and for resettling their islands. The U.S. suit was ultimately dismissed on the grounds that the judiciary can’t, in most circumstances, overrule the executive branch on matters of military and foreign policy. In Britain, the Chagossians were more successful. In 2002, they secured the right to full U.K. citizenship. Over 1,000 Chagossians have since moved to Britain in search of better lives. Twice more, British courts ruled in the people’s favor, with judges calling the government’s behavior “repugnant” and an “abuse of power.”

On the government’s final appeal, however, Britain’s then highest court, the Law Lords in the House of Lords, upheld the exile in a 3-2 decision. The Chagossians appealed to the European Court of Human Rights to overturn the ruling.

A Green Fiction

Before the European Court could rule, the British government announced the creation of the world’s largest Marine Protected Area (MPA) in the Chagos Archipelago. The date of the announcement, April Fool’s Day 2010, should have been a clue that there was more than environmentalism behind the move. The MPA banned commercial fishing and limited other human activity in the archipelago, endangering the viability of any resettlement efforts.

And then came WikiLeaks. In December 2010, it released a State Department cable from the U.S. Embassy in London quoting a senior Foreign and Commonwealth Office official saying that the “former inhabitants would find it difficult, if not impossible, to pursue their claim for resettlement on the islands if the entire Chagos Archipelago were a marine reserve.” U.S. officials agreed. According to the Embassy, Political Counselor Richard Mills wrote, “Establishing a marine reserve might, indeed… be the most effective long-term way to prevent any of the Chagos Islands’ former inhabitants or their descendants from resettling.”

Not surprisingly, the main State Department concern was whether the MPA would affect base operations. “We are concerned,” the London Embassy noted, that some “would come to see the existence of a marine reserve as inherently inconsistent with the military use of Diego Garcia.” British officials assured the Americans there would be “no constraints on military operations.”

Although the European Court of Human Rights ultimately ruled against the Chagossians in 2013, this March, a U.N. tribunal found that the British government had violated international law in creating the Marine Protected Area. Next week, Chagossians will challenge the MPA and their expulsion before the British Supreme Court (now Britain’s highest) armed with the U.N. ruling and revelations that the government won its House of Lords decision with the help of a fiction-filled resettlement study.

Meanwhile, the European Parliament has passed a resolution calling for the Chagossians’ return, the African Union has condemned their deportation as unlawful, three Nobel laureates have spoken out on their behalf, and dozens of members of the British Parliament have joined a group supporting their struggle. In January, a British government “feasibility study” found no significant legal barriers to resettling the islands and outlined several possible resettlement plans, beginning with Diego Garcia. (Notably, Chagossians are not calling for the removal of the U.S. military base. Their opinions about it are diverse and complicated. At least some would prefer jobs on the base to lives of poverty and unemployment in exile.)

Of course, no study was needed to know that resettlement on Diego Garcia and in the rest of the archipelago is feasible. The base, which has hosted thousands of military and civilian personnel for more than 40 years, has demonstrated that well enough. In fact, Stuart Barber, its architect, came to the same conclusion in the years before his death. After he learned of the Chagossians’ fate, he wrote a series of impassioned letters to Human Rights Watch and the British Embassy in Washington, among others, imploring them to help the Chagossians return home. In a letter to Alaska Senator Ted Stevens, he said bluntly that the expulsion “wasn’t necessary militarily.”

In a 1991 letter to the Washington Post, Barber suggested that it was time “to redress the inexcusably inhuman wrongs inflicted by the British at our insistence.” He added, “Substantial additional compensation for 18-25 past years of misery for all evictees is certainly in order. Even if that were to cost $100,000 per family, we would be talking of a maximum of $40-50 million, modest compared with our base investment there.”

Almost a quarter-century later, nothing has yet been done. In 2016, the initial 50-year agreement for Diego Garcia will expire. While it is subject to an automatic 20-year renewal, it provides for a two-year renegotiation period, which commenced in late 2014. With momentum building in support of the Chagossians, they are optimistic that the two governments will finally correct this historic injustice. That U.S. officials allowed the British feasibility study to consider resettlement plans for Diego Garcia is a hopeful sign that Anglo-American policy may finally be shifting to right a great wrong in the Indian Ocean.

Unfortunately, Aurélie Talate will never see the day when her people go home. Like others among the rapidly dwindling number of Chagossians born in the archipelago, Aurélie died in 2012 at age 70, succumbing to the heartbreak that is sagren.

David Vine is associate professor of anthropology at American University in Washington, D.C.

Rich Californians balk at limits: ‘We’re not all equal when it comes to water’

June 13,2015

by Rob Kuznia

Washington Post

RANCHO SANTA FE, CALIF. — Drought or no drought, Steve Yuhas resents the idea that it is somehow shameful to be a water hog. If you can pay for it, he argues, you should get your water.

People “should not be forced to live on property with brown lawns, golf on brown courses or apologize for wanting their gardens to be beautiful,” Yuhas fumed recently on social media. “We pay significant property taxes based on where we live,” he added in an interview. “And, no, we’re not all equal when it comes to water.”

Yuhas lives in the ultra-wealthy enclave of Rancho Santa Fe, a bucolic Southern California hamlet of ranches, gated communities and country clubs that guzzles five times more water per capita than the statewide average. In April, after Gov. Jerry Brown (D) called for a 25 percent reduction in water use, consumption in Rancho Santa Fe went up by 9 percent.

But a moment of truth is at hand for Yuhas and his neighbors, and all of California will be watching: On July 1, for the first time in its 92-year history, Rancho Santa Fe will be subject to water rationing.

“It’s no longer a ‘You can only water on these days’ ” situation, said Jessica Parks, spokeswoman for the Santa Fe Irrigation District, which provides water service to Rancho Santa Fe and other parts of San Diego County. “It’s now more of a ‘This is the amount of water you get within this billing period. And if you go over that, there will be high penalties.’ ”

So far, the community’s 3,100 residents have not felt the wrath of the water police. Authorities have issued only three citations for violations of a first round of rather mild water restrictions announced last fall. In a place where the median income is $189,000, where PGA legend Phil Mickelson once requested a separate water meter for his chipping greens, where financier Ralph Whitworth last month paid the Rolling Stones $2 million to play at a local bar, the fine, at $100, was less than intimidating.

All that is about to change, however. Under the new rules, each household will be assigned an essential allotment for basic indoor needs. Any additional usage — sprinklers, fountains, swimming pools — must be slashed by nearly half for the district to meet state-mandated targets.

Residents who exceed their allotment could see their already sky-high water bills triple. And for ultra-wealthy customers undeterred by financial penalties, the district reserves the right to install flow restrictors — quarter-size disks that make it difficult to, say, shower and do a load of laundry at the same time.

I

In extreme cases, the district could shut off the tap altogether.

The restrictions are among the toughest in the state, and residents of Rancho Santa Fe are feeling aggrieved.

“I think we’re being overly penalized, and we’re certainly being overly scrutinized by the world,” said Gay Butler, an interior designer out for a trail ride on her show horse, Bear. She said her water bill averages about $800 a month.

“It angers me because people aren’t looking at the overall picture,” Butler said. “What are we supposed to do, just have dirt around our house on four acres?”

Rancho Santa Fe residents are hardly the only Californians facing a water crackdown. On Friday, the state said it would impose sharp cutbacks on senior water rights dating back to the Gold Rush for the first time in four decades, a move that primarily hits farmers. And starting this month, all of California’s 400-plus water districts are under orders to reduce flow by at least 8 percent from 2013 levels.

Top water users such as Rancho Santa Fe are required to cut consumption by 36 percent. Other areas in the 36-percent crosshairs include much of the Central Valley, a farming region that runs up the middle of the state, and Orange County, a ritzy Republican stronghold between San Diego and Los Angeles.

“I call it the war on suburbia,” said Brett Barbre, who lives in the Orange County community of Yorba City, another exceptionally wealthy Zip code.

Barbre sits on the 37-member board of directors of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, a huge water wholesaler serving 17 million customers. He is fond of referring to his watering hose with Charlton Heston’s famous quote about guns: “They’ll have to pry it from my cold, dead hands.”

“California used to be the land of opportunity and freedom,” Barbre said. “It’s slowly becoming the land of one group telling everybody else how they think everybody should live their lives.”

Jurgen Gramckow, a sod farmer north of Los Angeles in Ventura County, agrees. He likens the freedom to buy water to the freedom to buy gasoline.

“Some people have a Prius; others have a Suburban,” Gramckow said. “Once the water goes through the meter, it’s yours.”

Yuhas, who hosts a conservative talk-radio show, abhors the culture of “drought-shaming” that has developed here since the drought began four years ago, especially the aerial shots of lavish lawns targeted for derision on the local TV news.

“I’m a conservative, so this is strange, but I defend Barbra Streisand’s right to have a green lawn,” said Yuhas, who splits his time between Rancho Santa Fe and Los Angeles. “When we bought, we didn’t plan on getting a place that looks like we’re living in an African savanna.”

Others are embarrassed by such defiance. Parks of the Sante Fe Irrigation District said she was mortified when the report came out earlier this month showing that Rancho Santa Fe had increased its water use — the only community in the region to do so.

“I kind of take it personally,” she said last week as she toured the community in an SUV bearing the water district’s logo.

Parks said she doesn’t know exactly what happened, but she has heard rumors that some people jacked up their water use in a misguided attempt to increase their baseline before rationing kicks in. With sprinkler restrictions already in place, she said the dynamic between local gardeners and her small team of enforcers is getting interesting.

“Everyone seems now to know what our cars look like,” she said. In Fairbanks Ranch, a gated community, “whenever one of our trucks go in, the gardeners all seem to call each other — text-message each other — to let them know that we’ve arrived. So then all of a sudden we see water kind of draining off the property but no sprinklers on.”

Because the restrictions that took effect in September didn’t register, the district further tightened the screws this month. Sprinkler days were reduced from three a week to two, while car-washing and garden fountains were banned altogether.

Holly Manion, a real estate agent who has lived on the Ranch, as it’s often called, for most of her 62 years, supports the restrictions. Although Manion cherishes the landscape of manicured lawns and burbling fountains that has long defined the Ranch, she thinks the drought requires a new way of life that emphasizes water conservation.

“Just take a drive around the area. You’ll see lakes low, rivers dry and hillsides parched,” Manion said, adding that she is appalled by people who tolerate leaking sprinklers and the resulting cascades of wasted water.

“There are people, they aren’t being responsible,” she said. “They’re just thinking of their own lives.”

Ann Boon, president of the Rancho Santa Fe Association, insists that most residents are taking the drought seriously. She said she was shocked by the reported 9 percent increase, arguing that it “must be some anomaly.”

“Everybody has been trying to cut back,” she said.

For example, many Rancho Santa Fe residents have enthusiastically embraced drought-tolerant landscaping. Manion took advantage of a rebate to rip out much of the turf on her three-acre property and replace it with succulents and decomposed-granite pathways. She left only a small patch of grass for her two dogs to play on.

“It makes me happy when I look at it, because it’s thriving,” she said.

Butler said she, too, is replacing grass with drought-friendly native landscaping on her four acres, at a cost of nearly $80,000. (She’ll get a rebate for about $12,000.) But she came to the decision grudgingly, she said. And she defends the amount of water she and her neighbors need for their vast estates.

“You could put 20 houses on my property, and they’d have families of at least four. In my house, there is only two of us,” Butler said. So “they’d be using a hell of a lot more water than we’re using.”

Rancho Santa Fe resident Randy Woods was feeling burdened by his lush landscape and opted to downsize. The 60-something chief executive of a biotech company moved a year ago from a two-acre estate — replete with two waterfalls, two Jacuzzis, a swimming pool and an orchard — to a condo in the tiny core of town known as “the Village.”

Woods said some of his friends would like to do the same, largely to cut down on their bloated water bills. But they have encountered an unforeseen obstacle, he said: The drought has dampened demand for large estates in San ­Diego County.

Woods said his girlfriend is among those struggling to sell. Her home boasts a yard designed by Kate Sessions, a well-known landscape architect and botanist who died in 1940. But now, the rare palm tree specimens, the secret garden and the turret-shaped hedges are a liability rather than a selling point.

Another friend, Woods said, has seen the value of his nine-acre plot plummet from $30 million to $22 million.

As for Woods, his monthly water bill has shriveled from $500 to around $50.

“My friends,” he said, “are all jealous.”

Rancho Santa Fe resident Randy Woods was feeling burdened by his lush landscape and opted to downsize. The 60-something chief executive of a biotech company moved a year ago from a two-acre estate — replete with two waterfalls, two Jacuzzis, a swimming pool and an orchard — to a condo in the tiny core of town known as “the Village.”

Woods said some of his friends would like to do the same, largely to cut down on their bloated water bills. But they have encountered an unforeseen obstacle, he said: The drought has dampened demand for large estates in San ­Diego County.

Woods said his girlfriend is among those struggling to sell. Her home boasts a yard designed by Kate Sessions, a well-known landscape architect and botanist who died in 1940. But now, the rare palm tree specimens, the secret garden and the turret-shaped hedges are a liability rather than a selling point.

Another friend, Woods said, has seen the value of his nine-acre plot plummet from $30 million to $22 million.

As for Woods, his monthly water bill has shriveled from $500 to around $50.

“My friends,” he said, “are all jealous.”

By the numbers: US police kill more in days than other countries do in years

June 9, 2015

by Jamiles Lartey

The Guardian

It’s rather difficult to compare data from different time periods, according to different methodologies, across different parts of the world, and still come to definitive conclusions.

But now that we have built The Counted, a definitive record of people killed by police in the US this year, at least there is some accountability in America – even if data from the rest of the world is still catching up.

It is undeniable that police in the US often contend with much more violent situations and more heavily armed individuals than police in other developed democratic societies. Still, looking at our data for the US against admittedly less reliable information on police killings elsewhere paints a dramatic portrait, and one that resonates with protests that have gone global since a killing last year in Ferguson, Missouri: the US is not just some outlier in terms of police violence when compared with countries of similar economic and political standing.

Fact: In the first 24 days of 2015, police in the US fatally shot more people than police did in England and Wales, combined, over the past 24 years.

Behind the numbers: According to The Counted, the Guardian’s special project to track every police killing this year, there were 59 fatal police shootings in the US for the days between 1 January and 24 January.

According to data collected by the UK advocacy group Inquest, there have been 55 fatal police shootings – total – in England and Wales from 1990 to 2014.

The US population is roughly six times that of England and Wales. According to the World Bank, the US has a per capita intentional homicide rate five times that of the UK.

Fact: There has been just one fatal shooting by Icelandic police in the country’s 71-year history. The city of Stockton, California – with 25,000 fewer residents than all of Iceland combined – had three fatal encounters in the first five months of 2015.

Behind the numbers: A 2013 police shooting in Iceland drew international attention because it was the first of its kind; there had literally never been a fatal police shooting recorded there before two years ago.

In Stockton, Patrick Wetter, Matautu Nuu and Carl Lao were all fatally shot by police in the 64-day span between 6 January and 4 March. According to US census data from 2013, Stockton has a population of 298,118; World Bank data puts Iceland’s population at 323,764 for the same year.

Iceland’s official intentional homicide rate is so low that it does not register in World Bank data on intentional homicides per 100,000 people. For the US, the rate is five per 100,000.

Fact: Police in the US have shot and killed more people – in every week this year – than are reportedly shot and killed by German police in an entire year.

Behind the numbers: The Counted database shows that the first week of 2015 had the fewest fatal police shootings of any this year, with 13.

The German Police University concluded in 2012 that German police had killed six people by gunshot in 2011 and seven in 2012.

According to the German data and the Guardian’s count, more unarmed black men (19) have been fatally shot by US police in 2015 than citizens of any race, armed or unarmed, fatally shot in Germany during all of 2010 and 2011 (15).

The US population is roughly four times that of Germany, and according to the World Bank, the US has a per capita intentional homicide rate five times that of Germany.

Fact: Police in the US fatally shot more people in one month this year than police in Australia officially reported during a span of 19 years.

Behind the numbers: The Counted database shows that police in the US fatally shot 97 people in March 2015, the highest one-month total recorded by the Guardian.

A 2013 study from the Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) found 94 fatal police shootings for the period between 1992 and 2011.

In Australia, as opposed to the US, all police shootings are subject to national monitoring by law. The US population is nearly 14 times that of Australia, and the US has a per capita intentional homicide rate five times that of Australia.

Fact: Police in Canada average 25 fatal shooting a year. In California, a state just 10% more populous than Canada, police in 2015 have fatally shot nearly three times as many people in just five months.

Behind the numbers: So far in 2015, police in California have fatally shot 72 people, according to the Guardian’s database – the most thorough accounting for officer-involved fatalities ever built in the US.

But a journalist for the Independent in Canada did combine data from the provinces that report police killings – and extrapolated that Canadian police kill an average of 25 people by gunshot every year.

The US has an intentional homicide rate two and a half times that of Canada, according to the World Bank.

Fact: Police fired 17 bullets at Antonio Zambrano-Montes, who was “armed” with a rock. That’s nearly three times what police in Finland are reported to have fired during all of 2013.

Behind the numbers: Zambrano-Montes was killed in February by officers responding to reports that he was throwing rocks at cars. The incident was caught on video, with 17 shots fired; according to police, “five or six” struck Zambrano-Montes.

In Finland, according to chief inspector Jukka Salmine, police fired just six bullets in all of 2013.

Putin says Russia beefing up nuclear arsenal

June 16, 2015

by Maria Tsvetkova

Reuters

President Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday Russia would add more than 40 new intercontinental ballistic missiles to its nuclear arsenal this year, a remark that is likely to increase alarm in the West.

Putin made his announcement a day after Russian officials denounced a U.S. plan to station tanks and heavy weapons in NATO states on Russia’s border as the most aggressive act by Washington since the Cold War.

Tension has resurged between Russia and Western powers over Moscow’s role in the Ukraine crisis, in which pro-Russian separatist forces have seized a large part of the country’s east after Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in early 2014.

The West, led by the European Union and United States, have imposed punitive economic sanctions on Russia.

“More than 40 new intercontinental ballistic missiles able to overcome even the most technically advanced anti-missile defense systems will be added to the make-up of the nuclear arsenal this year,” Putin, flanked by army officers, said in a speech at an arms fair west of Moscow.

Intercontinental ballistic missiles have a minimum range of more than 5,500 km (3,400 miles). Putin gave no more details of which missiles were being added to the nuclear arsenal.

He has said several times that Russia must maintain its nuclear deterrence to counter what he sees as growing security threats, and Moscow reserves the right to deploy nuclear weapons in Crimea.

Such comments have helped whip up anti-Western sentiment and rally support behind Putin but have caused concern in the West, particularly countries on or near Russia’s borders.

FEARS OF A NEW ARMS RACE

Russian officials warned on Monday that Moscow would retaliate if the United States carried out its plan to store heavy military equipment in eastern Europe, including in the Baltic states that were once in the Soviet Union.

“The feeling is that our colleagues from NATO countries are pushing us into an arms race,” RIA news agency quoted Deputy Defense Minister Anatoly Antonov as saying during “Army 2015″, a fair at which arms and other military equipment are on show.

Putin has said Moscow will not be drawn into a new arms race although Russia is modernizing its armed forces. Putin said in his speech that 70 percent of the military equipment in use would by 2020 be the most up-to-date and top-quality.

But lavish military spending is weighing heavily on Russia’s national budget at a time when the economy is sliding toward recession, hit by low oil prices and Western sanctions.

The Kremlin portrays spending on the Russian arms sector as a driver of economic growth, but Putin’s critics say it is excessive and comes at the expense of social needs.

A last great unprotected wilderness, safe haven for endangered species and home to native people whose subsistence lifestyle has survived in harmony with nature for thousands of years.

It is here that Shell plans to drill for oil, pulling the detonator on a carbon bomb which eventually could spray 150bn tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

The irony is that the drilling is only possible because manmade climate change is already causing this region to grow warmer twice as fast as the rest of the planet. The melting ice makes these huge reserves of oil and gas more accessible.

It could set major oil companies against each other but also superpower against superpower as they scramble to exploit the last untapped giant reserves in a part of the world where territorial boundaries remain unclear. No wonder some fear a new cold war.

Barrow, the most northerly city in the US, is ground zero for the world’s most controversial oil drilling campaign. Less than 1,200 miles from the north pole, Barrow is also known as a base for climate change study.

Originally called Ukpeagvik, place where the snowy owls are hunted, the town of 4,500 residents was renamed in 1825 after Sir John Barrow of the British Admiralty by naval officers mapping the region for the UK.

Now a new British presence is being established by the Anglo Dutch Shell and it is also not one which is welcome by all, especially some of those who live in the tumble of wooden homes that hug the shoreline.

Rosemary Ahtuangaruak is one of them. She describes herself as an environmental justice adviser but is also a former mayor, trained health worker and stalwart defender of Inupiat culture.

“I work with non­profit organisations that want to protect the Arctic Ocean and wilderness areas. It’s about raising the importance of health, tradition and culture in the venues of those (Shell and others) who want to change our lands and waters,” she says, one eye on three grandchildren she is minding.

“It’s about the (any future oil) spill. They cannot clear up in ice conditions which we have for eight or nine months of the year. The ecosystem renewal, which is needed for the many different animals that migrate here, is important because we are feeding our families from the ocean. We must keep this environment pristine.”

The wild rose of the Tundra, as one critic labelled her, is convinced the subsistence way of life practised by the Inupiat could be extinguished for future generations in the event of oil pollution.

She says she has seen at close quarters what happens in a community that is subject to an oil rush. Although many outsiders presume that fossil fuel extraction is new to the northern shores of Alaska, the contrary is true.

BP and others have been producing oil at Prudhoe Bay down the coast east from Barrow for more than half century. But that is no reassurance to Ahtuangaruak who worked as a health aide – and briefly as mayor of the small village of Nuiqsut, an Inupiat community right next door to Prudhoe Bay.

“I learned living in Nuiqsut there are some really serious health impacts that happen to our people living in the same area where this is happening (oil extraction): cancer rates have gone up … acute sensitivity to chemicals and even suicides. I had to deal with the sick babies. That’s why I argue so hard now.”

Shell is exploring its own small section of the far north but the US Geological Survey has estimated there could be 412bn barrels of oil equivalents reserves in the wider Arctic region.

The combined onshore and offshore acreage stretching across the top of the globe from Alaska through Greenland and Russia would be far more likely to be sought if Shell gets a good result in the Chukchi.

A successful strike by Anglo Dutch energy group will trigger a black gold rush to the wider polar region which is believed to hold the last remaining giant reserves in the world.

The US Geological Survey has estimated there is 30% of the world’s undiscovered gas and 13% of oil waiting to be found inside the Arctic circle.

A drop in the price of oil from $115 per barrel last summer to $65 now has forced oil companies – including Shell – to slash their annual capital spending.

But such is the lure of the Arctic for Shell that it has ring fenced this operation despite having spent $6bn on fruitless drilling so far.

And continuing interest in the mineral riches of the Arctic by Russia, Norway Greenland and others has brought sabre rattling: a significant build up in military spending and activity.

The Polish Institute of International Affairs (PISM) warned recently that Moscow is setting up a naval infantry brigade, an air defence division, and a coastal missile system, in outlying archipelagos in the Arctic Ocean.

The Ukraine crisis has ramped up tension – as has a provocative visit to the Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic by Russia’s deputy prime minister, Dmitry Rogozin.

All the states surrounding the Arctic Ocean are involved in a kind of land grab, applying for right to license oil and gas by making territorial claims under a UN Law of the Sea Treaty.

And the Russians have already signalled the importance they attach to the region by planting a flag on the bottom of the ocean at the north pole. The move by veteran Arctic explorer Artur Chilingarov in 2007 caused widespread protest from the rest of the world but Vladimir Putin laughed it off as a bit of theatre.

The Arctic Council of littoral states has been meeting regularly and played down any suspicions of a growing new cold war.

Rob Huebert, professor of political science at the University of Calgary, is worried: “The intrusions of unidentified submarine in Swedish and Finnish waters and aircraft incursions into Norwegian airspace demonstrates what they (the Russians) can do and it also demonstrates what the western nations now have to begin to prepare for.”

A long and boisterous queue snakes down the road from a blue wooden clapboard home in the strong spring sunshine.

The line of blue jeans and coloured anoraks is mainly made up of middle aged or young couples, their children playing in the snow in front of the house.

When the older members of the community arrive later on ­often propped up by relatives and walking frames­ they are immediately ushered to the front of the long line.

Suddenly the door opens and a smiling host greets the carnival like crowd. “Hey, hey hey,” he cries. “Hey, hey, hey,” they shout back as they begin to move through a side entrance from where a sweet but distinctive smell emanates. This is called a whale feast but it’s a relatively brief affair.

Within minutes the front door opens and the same visitors stream out clutching small plastic bags full of whale meat or skin and blubber, muktuk, and thanking the owner of the house.

That is Gordon Brower, a 52-year-old local whaling captain, who is performing a ritual central to the local Inupiat culture: hosting the entire “village” of Barrow to celebrate each successful hunt.

Whaling has been going on for centuries in this part of the world and the hundreds of residents who are involved in supporting the various crews tend to be at the centre of opposition to Shell’s Chukchi drilling programme.

Bowhead whales migrate in the spring and autumn in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas off the coast of Barrow and the wider North Slope region. These enormous mammals stand to be disrupted most by oil.

Rosemary Ahtuangaruak argues that the whaling, which cannot by law be done on a commercial basis and which is heavily controlled by a quota system, is not just a cultural event. It is about survival in a town where supermarket food costs are astonishingly high as everything used or sold in Barrow has to be airlifted in.

“Right now our people are out on the ice providing the nutritious food from the bowhead whale…We cannot replace those foods in our diet – not from shop foods out of a box,” she argues.

The Inupiat of northern Alaska are not alone in their worries about the future of their way of life.

This is a central issue too for the Inuit Circumpolar Council, which represents 160,000 indigenous peoples from Alaska, through Canada and Greenland to Russia.

Aqqaluk Lynge, the chairman of the Council, expressed his worst fears a few years ago when he said: “When I’m lying awake at night, I pray we don’t find oil.”

But not everyone in Barrow is gloomy. Many are aware that the local economy in the wider North Slope area has grown relatively prosperous on the back of half a century of hydrocarbons at Prudhoe Bay.

It is not unusual then to come across someone such as local carver Ron Saganna or Jake Calderwood, a 29-year-old, bushy­-bearded, music teacher at the local Fred Ipalook elementary school who are essentially supportive of drilling.

Standing most firmly against ‘big oil’ and local government is George Edwardson, a flamboyant and respected elder in the Inupiat community.

With white hair flowing down his back, a ready smile and a conspiratorial wink, George was, until health intervened, president of the Inupiat Community of the Arctic Slope for 20 years.

“Shell is a bulldog that is acting on behalf of other foreign oil companies. It used to be BP until the Gulf of Mexico. Basically lease sale 193 (which gives Shell the right to acreage in the Chukchi) was illegal. The MMS (Minerals Management Service) violated the law because the right environmental impact assessments were not completed,” he says.

When Alaska was bought by the US government in the mid 1800s for $7.2m (£4.6m) critics called it Seward’s folly after the secretary of state who was accused of overpaying the Russians.

It is tempting to think that the decision by Washington to grant drilling rights to Shell in the waters off Alaska this month may yet become known as something worse: Mankind’s folly.

And those against big oil’s Arctic adventure are aware that any success by Shell will have major reverberations around the top of the world. ConocoPhillips and other oil companies are present in Barrow and interested in the icy waters.

Charlotte Brower, the mayor of the North Slope borough, is in the hot seat when it comes to the most basic conflict in Barrow and the surrounding villages: oil versus the environment.

She has little time for those who think oil companies should be stopped in their tracks saying all basic services in the form of schools, hospitals, roads and utilities have been paid for in oil-derived revenues from Prudhoe Bay.

“There are parts of the world that have enjoyed these services for so long that the potential of living without them seems foreign, but among our people there are those of us who can still remember when some parents had to watch their children die in their arms because there was no clinic or medical staff to treat relatively simple ailments.”

“Our leaders have worked diligently to strike a balance that ensures resource development to ensure our people do not have to endure these condition any longer while protecting our a pillar of our culture, our subsistence harvests. We will continue to strike that balance for the good of our people.”

Ben van Beurden, the chief executive of Shell, told the Guardian that he would not enter the Arctic unless it could be done safely although he dismissed as “emotional” suggestions Shell should stay away just because the region was showing advanced signs of climate change. “I have spent a lot of time on this and I think we can do it responsibly.”

However much the Dutchman dresses it up, Shell is taking a significant gamble on the environment – and his own company.

The Deepwater Horizon accident in the Gulf of Mexico has already cost BP $40bn and left it at one stage close to collapse.

While the Shell drilling in the Arctic is in shallower water and lower well pressures, the stakes are much higher. The reputational risks alone convinced Shell’s French rival Total that it should abandon any post-Macondo oil search in the Arctic.

Equally the mayor of Barrow is presiding over a community deeply divided over oil – even before the drilling starts.

Activists such as Rosemary Ahtuangaruak, tribal leaders such as George Edwardson and the whalers will continue to voice their opposition.

The most vulnerable potential victims of big oil – the migrating eider ducks, the whales, walruses, seals and polar bears – have no say.

The Great Mortgage Swindle: Countrywide, the Subprime Kings

Many factors combined to create the current housing crisis in the United States.

Low interest rates after the 2001 stock market crash spurred the housing boom. Housing prices skyrocketed above historic trendlines. People were duped into thinking prices would rise forever, but it was inevitable that the housing bubble would burst, and houses would suddenly be worth a lot less. With house prices falling, lots of people are now finding they owe more than their house is worth. This problem is exacerbated by predatory loan arrangements that have left millions facing suddenly rising mortgage payments.

A lot of people and corporations deserve blame for this state of affairs.

Instead of warning consumers about the housing bubble – which would have gone a long way to counter the excessive price run-ups – then-Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan denied a bubble was occurring.

Wall Street firms created exotic investment instruments that made possible the purchase and trading of large numbers of mortgages. This created conditions so that banks and initial lenders took less care in issuing mortgages – since they wouldn’t be responsible for mortgages gone bad. The Wall Street firms not only sold these instruments to duped investors, they took on major liabilities on their own – even though it was obvious the housing bubble would have to burst.

Rating agencies like Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s, which evaluated the riskiness of these new mortgage investment instruments, failed utterly. The housing bubble meant mortgage investments were sure to lose money, but the ratings agencies gave them top ratings anyway. Along with the “innovation” of the Wall Street firms, the ratings agencies helped maintain a market that dramatically exacerbated, and to a considerable degree may have created, the housing bubble.

Financial bubbles create an incentive for criminal and shady activity. Just like the stock bubble of the late 1990s created the climate for Enron and dozens of other companies to cook their books, the housing bubble created incentives for predatory lenders to exploit consumers.

The predatory lenders offered low rates, at least at first. Rates would rise later, but the lenders said that – because home prices were rising so fast and would continue to do so – borrowers could always refinance with a new loan.

The biggest of the predatory lenders was Countrywide, a mortgage lender acquired by Bank of America in January 2008. The company and its CEO, Angelo Mozilo, made a bundle, while setting up thousands and thousands of families for financial ruin.

“Over the past few years,” says Martin Eakes of the Center for Responsible Lending, “by steering millions of people into bad loans, Countrywide has been the largest rogue mortgage lender in the country. According to Countrywide’s own data, more than 80 percent of its exotic adjustable-rate loans were made to borrowers that do not meet current banking standards. Countrywide knew that these homeowners would not be able to make their monthly loan payments after dramatic payment increases became effective.”

The Center for Responsible Lending has compiled a dossier on Countrywide’s irresponsible practices, presented in a report, “Unfair and Unsafe.” Its devastating report, based on customer complaints, lawsuits, regulatory actions, news accounts, government reports and company documents, shows how Countrywide engaged in rampant wrongdoing:

Predatory lending.

“Lawsuits filed around the country have accused Countrywide of preying on borrowers through a variety of unfair and fraudulent tactics that have siphoned equity out of their homes and pushed many into foreclosure,” notes “Unfair and Unsafe.” “Borrowers and regulators have accused the company of: steering borrowers with good credit into higher-cost ‘subprime’ loans; gouging minority borrowers with discriminatory rates and fees; working in cahoots with mortgage brokers who use bait-and-switch tactics to land borrowers into loans they can’t afford; targeting elderly and non-English-speaking borrowers for abusive loans; and packing loans with inflated and unauthorized fees.”

In one lawsuit, Albert Zacholl, a 74-year-old man living in Southern California, alleges that Countrywide and a pair of mortgage brokers “cold-called and aggressively baited” him. They promised him $30,000 cash, a mortgage that would replace his previous mortgage (which was leaving him owing more each month) and a monthly payment that would not exceed $1,700. Zacholl told the brokers that his income consisted of a pension of $350 a month and Social Security payments of $958, and that with help from his son, he could afford a mortgage up to $1,700. According to the lawsuit, the broker falsified his loan application by putting down an income of $7,000 a month, and then arranged for a high-interest mortgage that required him to pay more than $3,000 a month (and failed to deliver the $30,000 cash payment). The motivation for the scam, according to the lawsuit, was to collect $13,000 in fees.

In court papers, the Center for Responsible Lending reports, Countrywide responded that Zacholl “consented to the terms of the transaction” and that any problems were the result of his own “negligence and carelessness.”

Dangerous products.

Countrywide has been a leader in pushing unsound mortgage terms. These include “exploding” subprime adjustable rate mortgages – with reasonable interest rates in the first year that jump in subsequent years, often by as much as 30 percent to 50 percent.

Conflicts of interest.

“Countrywide has created a corporate structure designed to allow its subsidiaries to work hand-in-hand in squeezing borrowers with excessive fees and penalties,” according to “Unfair and Unsafe.” Countrywide affiliates handle appraisals, credit reports, flood certifications and other documentation for new loans; provide “force-placing” insurance for borrowers whose homeowners insurance has lapsed; and serve as a foreclosure trustee. The interconnections enable Countrywide to charge high fees, and deny borrowers the benefit of third parties’ independent judgment and independent interests.

Broken promises on loan modifications.

The company has a history of failing to fully live up to its promises to help borrowers keep their homes by modifying onerous loans, according to “Unfair and Unsafe.” The report cites a Fall 2007 Credit Suisse review that ranked Countrywide as one of the mortgage lenders least willing to adjust loan terms.

Countrywide says it is committed to working out fair arrangements to keep homeowners in their houses. In December, it entered into an arrangement with the community group ACORN designed to help subprime borrowers.

“During the first 11 months of 2007, Countrywide helped more than 69,000 customers retain their homes through solutions such as loan modifications, long-term repayment plans, special forbearance and other options,” says Steve Bailey, a Countrywide senior managing director of loan administration. “Regardless of the reason for the payment difficulties, Countrywide wants to try to find reasonable solutions for our borrowers.”

Abusive loan servicing.

Borrowers claim that Countrywide has engaged in sloppy and fraudulent loan servicing that has produced unwarranted fees and foreclosures.

With the collapse of the housing market in 2007, Countrywide’s fortunes turned, its mortgage-backed securities plummeted in value, and the company seemed on the edge of bankruptcy. In January 2008, Bank of America agreed to buy the company.

Do not weep for company co-founder and long-time CEO Angelo Mozilo, however. Mozilo grabbed compensation worth $185 million from 2002-2006, according to an analysis by the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Between November 2006 and December 2007, Mozilo sold $150 million in stock – effectively jumping from a sinking corporate ship for which he was supposedly at the helm, or at least on the captain’s deck.

“Particularly, the discrepancy between Mr. Mozilo’s compensation and Countrywide’s performance is striking,” concludes the Oversight Committee analysis. “In 2007, Countrywide announced a $1.2 billion loss in the third quarter and an additional loss of $422 million in the fourth quarter.” By the end of the year, the company’s stock fell 80 percent from its February peak. “During the same period, Mr. Mozilo was paid $1.9 million in salary, received $20 million in stock awards contingent upon performance, and sold $121 million in stock.”

Mozilo retired as CEO in 2006, remaining as company chair and an employee. The House Oversight Committee analysis shows that his compensation contract, taking effect in 2007, was outrageous, and based in part on recommendations from a compensation consultant loyal to Mozilo rather than Countrywide.

Even so, Mozilo was bitter that the company did not give him everything he wanted. In an e-mail message turned up by the Oversight Committee, Mozilo wrote to the compensation consultant:

“I appreciate your input but at this stage in my life at Countrywide this process is no longer about money but more about respect and acknowledgement of my accomplishments. … Boards have been placed under enormous pressure by the left wing anti business press and the envious leaders of unions and other so called ‘CEO Comp Watchers’ and therefore Boards are being forced to protect themselves irrespective of the potential negative long term impact on public companies. I strongly believe that a decade from now there will be a recognition that entrepreneurship has been driven out of the public sector resulting in underperforming companies and a willingness on the part of Boards to pay for performance.”

With attention focused on the discrepancy between Mozilo’s compensation package and Countrywide’s well-being, he waived various payments – totaling $37.5 million – he could have received once Bank of America finalizes its takeover.

In March 2008, Mozilo appeared before the House Oversight Committee to explain his compensation.

“Countrywide’s board,” he testified, “has aligned the interests of our top executives, including me, with shareholders by making our compensation primarily performance-based – namely, tied to earnings per share and share price appreciation. Since 1982 through early 2007, Countrywide’s stock appreciated over 23,000 percent, reaching a peak market value of over $25 billion from a starting value of zero. As a result, over recent years, I have received substantial income from bonuses under a formula that was approved by our shareholders on at least two occasions.”

He also received substantial stock options, explaining, these were “options that required the price of the stock to rise above the option price before any income could be realized, thereby aligning me squarely with our shareholders.” In anticipation of his retirement, he testified, he put in place a plan to cash in some stock options earned in earlier years. His sales were thus planned in advance of Countrywide’s downturn. But he continues to hold substantial shares in Countrywide – shares worth much less than before the company’s stock collapsed.

Mozilo testified that he is “very proud of the home ownership opportunities that Countrywide has provided for over 20 million families,” while acknowledging the hardship faced by homeowners and Countrywide employees and shareholders.

“In my 55 years in the industry,” he said, “this by far is the worst housing crisis I have ever seen, combined with an unprecedented collapse of the credit and liquidity markets.”

“The problem we face,” he said, “is the deterioration of the value of homes. As values were going up, we had no problem. We had no delinquencies and no foreclosures, because people had options, because people run into three things in their lives generally – loss of job, loss of marriage, loss of health. When that happens and they own a home, and it impacts their income, they generally have a way out – sell the house, refinance, do something.

“That equity that they have in their homes has been virtually wiped out. And that’s what’s exacerbating this whole foreclosure problem.”

Wasn’t that problem entirely foreseeable? Didn’t Countrywide’s lending policies – which generously might be called aggressive – depend on constantly rising housing values in what was obviously a bubble market?

Washington, D.C. May 27, 2015: “In spite of their fond beliefs, there is no secrecy any more. The government spies on the rest of us and we spy on them. The Deep Internet is one source the government snoopers cannot get into and many of us know that the so-called ‘Social Networks’ like Facebook, cooperate with government snoops. Avoid it by all means and if you have children, warn them and then block Facebook from their computers. We spy on the Russians, Israel spies on us and the Brits fall all over themselves to please America. The Germans are aware of CIA penetrations of their top-level governmental agencies and indivduals and have taken, and are taking, steps to neutralize them. Both the Ukraine and Greece are totally bankrupt and run around demanding other countries give them money. Their economies are equal to those of some mid-African country. Too many citizens, no products to sell and a heavy birth rate. Hordes of Africans and Arab types are flooding into Europe, looking for free food and housing and the Europeans are becoming very angry about this. The liberal media babbles and chatters about the joys of brotherhood but the public is neither reading or listening. When the Norwegian nut, Brevik, shot up the young campers, he only shot dark-skinned ones, a fact the twits in the media carefully ignored.”

Nuclear power plant technicians, senior military officers, FBI contractors and an employee of “a highly-secretive Department of Defense agency” with a Top Secret clearance. Those are just a few of the more than 100 people with sensitive military and government connections that law enforcement is tracking because they are linked to “outlaw motorcycle gangs.”

A year before the deadly Texas shootout that killed nine people on May 17, a lengthy report by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives detailed the involvement of U.S. military personnel and government employees in outlaw motorcycle gangs, or OMGs. A copy of the report was obtained by The Intercept.

The report lays out, in almost obsessive detail, the extent to which OMG members are represented in nearly every part of the military, and in federal and local government, from police and fire departments to state utility agencies. Specific examples from the report include dozens of Defense Department contractors with Secret or Top Secret clearances; multiple FBI contractors; radiological technicians with security clearances; U.S. Department of Homeland Security employees; Army, Navy and Air Force active-duty personnel, including from the special operations force community; and police officers.

“The OMG community continues to spread its tentacles throughout all facets of government,” the report says.

The relationship between OMGs and law enforcement has come under scrutiny after it became known that law enforcement were on site in Waco bracing for conflict.

The 40-page report, “OMGs and the Military 2014,” issued by ATF’s Office of Strategic Intelligence and Information in July of last year, warned of the escalating violence of these gangs. “Their insatiable appetite for dominance has led to shootings, assaults and malicious attacks across the globe. OMGs continue to maim and murder over territory,” the report said. “As tensions escalate, brazen shootings are occurring in broad daylight.”

The ATF report is based on intelligence gathered by dozens of law enforcement and military intelligence agencies, and identifies about 100 alleged associates of the country’s most violent outlaw motorcycle gangs and support clubs who have worked in sensitive government or military positions.

Those gangs “continue to court active-duty military personnel and government workers, both civilians and contractors, for their knowledge, reliable income, tactical skills and dedication to a cause,” according to the report. “Through our extensive analysis, it has been revealed that a large number of support clubs are utilizing active-duty military personnel and U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) contractors and employees to spread their tentacles across the United States.”

The report predicted that six dominant OMGs — Mongols, Hells Angels, Outlaws, Pagans, Bandidos and Vagos — would continue to expand, with escalating violence. The groups are known as “one-percenter” clubs, a moniker they proudly use to denote their outlaw status. The report identifies the most violent as Bandidos and Hell’s Angels support clubs — the same groups involved in a deadly shootout in Waco, Texas on Sunday.

The deadly confrontation involved the Bandidos and a rival club, the Cossacks MC, who are backed by Bandidos’ arch rivals, the Hell’s Angels. The shootout was part of a ongoing turf battle: Without permission from the Bandidos, Cossacks members have begun wearing a patch on their vests that claims Texas as the club’s territory — a figurative thumb in the eye of the Bandidos, long the state’s dominant motorcycle club. Nine people were killed and more than 170 bikers were arrested in the noontime showdown.

On Wednesday, law enforcement in Texas confirmed to several media outlets that one of the bikers arrested in the massive post-shootout sweep was a former San Antonio police detective, who joined the Bandidos after retiring from the department after 32 years.

The ATF report identifies the Bandidos as the dominant and most violent of the motorcycle gangs in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, and identifies a staff sergeant instructor in the United States Air Force, currently stationed at Keesler Air Force Base, as the president of the local Pistoleros chapter, a Bandidos support club. According to the report, he routinely hosts parties for active duty military personnel.

In response to questions about the report, an ATF spokesperson said, “This was supposed to be solely a law enforcement tool to help fight violent crime. It was not supposed to be out there in the ether for general consumption.” The Intercept, after consulting with ATF, has redacted some portions of the report.

In an interview, Edward Winterhalder, a former high-ranking member of the Bandidos who left the club in 2003, said that while military veterans have long been involved in motorcycle clubs — many of the current outlaw clubs were formed in the wake of World War II — current-duty military or law enforcement members are not generally involved in the most violent gangs.

According to Winterhalder, biker clubs not associated with the violent one-percenters have many government employees — current military, law enforcement and firefighters — as members. Indeed, some clubs have emerged that pointedly disavow any connections to violence or lawlessness, or that specifically bill themselves as a LEMC — law enforcement motorcycle club.

Among those are the Iron Circle LEMC, a Texas club formed in 2006; the Arizona-founded Roughnecks Country MC — for the “99 percent … that gives a shit about society and the laws that govern the world we live in”; the Iron Order MC, a fiercely independent club that strongly rejects the ethos of the one-percenters; and the Protectors LEMC, which requires a criminal background check for prospective members.

Nonetheless, the report documents extensive involvement of current-duty military and government personnel in the outlaw groups, and does not mention LEMCs.

The report is a testament to how seriously law enforcement takes the issue of outlaw motorcycle gangs, detailing extensive surveillance; the document includes copies of military or government identification photos, some gained from traffic stops, and information from what appears to be close monitoring of military and government officials who attend the groups’ gatherings and activities across the country.

Rove’s Crossroads PAC Is No Longer G.O.P.’s ‘Big Dog’

May 21, 2015

by Eric Lichtblau and Maggie Haberman

New York Times

WASHINGTON — For three election cycles, American Crossroads, the brainchild of Karl Rove and other leading Republican strategists, has been among the most powerful forces in national politics, a shadow party that has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising, data and opposition research to help elect candidates.

But in the early days of the 2016 presidential campaign, Crossroads — among the first outside groups to fully exploit the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision unleashing wealthy donors and corporations — has been buffeted by a rapidly changing political landscape that is testing its pre-eminence, and potentially its survival.

The nonprofit arm of Crossroads is facing an Internal Revenue Service review that could eviscerate its fund-raising. Data projects nurtured by Mr. Rove are being supplanted in Republican circles by a more successful initiative funded by the Koch political network, which has leapfrogged the Crossroads organizations in size and reach.

And the group faces intense competition for donors from a new wave of “super PACs” that are being set up by backers of the leading Republican candidates for president, who are unwilling to defer to Mr. Rove’s authority or cede strategic and fund-raising dominance to the organizations he helped start

In recent weeks, Crossroads has begun carving a niche for itself in attacking Hillary Rodham Clinton, the presumed Democratic front-runner. The group will use polling data and opposition research to paint her as “a typical politician who would say or do anything to get elected,” said Steven Law, president of Crossroads.

If the group’s role seems diminished, Crossroads officials are not complaining publicly. If anything, they are lowering expectations for an organization that raised $300 million in the 2012 cycle.

“Our goal is not to make American Crossroads the big dog of 2016,” Mr. Law said in an interview. “Our goal is to win the White House and hold the Senate and the House.”

He added that in the large field of Republican groups and campaigns, “we’re a first baseman who effectively plays our position.”

“We’re a critical player,” he said, “but part of the team.”

The group still plans to get heavily involved in some Senate primaries and in defending Senate seats in the general elections in 2016, officials involved with Crossroads said. The creation of the Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC blessed by Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, and operated by Crossroads leadership, will be a major vehicle for that. But Crossroads’s involvement in the presidential race is still under discussion.

Mr. Rove, the veteran Republican operative whom President George W. Bush called the architect of his 2004 re-election campaign, declined to comment on the group’s role in the 2016 campaign, referring questions to Mr. Law.

But there is no doubt other groups have emerged that have moved beyond simply flooding the airwaves with television ads — traditionally the major priority of Crossroads. Charles G. and David H. Koch, who began Americans for Prosperity about the same time as Crossroads was founded, have expanded their political network, focusing on grass-roots organizing, developing a sustainable trove of voter data, and starting an initiative called Libre, which is aimed at engaging Hispanic voters.

Republican presidential candidates, using fund-raising techniques that Crossroads itself helped pioneer, are creating their own super PACs that have enabled large donors to make unlimited contributions directly through them rather than through outside groups like Crossroads.

Chief among them is Right to Rise, the super PAC that is supporting Jeb Bush, whose donor network overlaps significantly with that of Crossroads.

The group is facing a long list of other political and financial obstacles as well. Two of the biggest donors to Crossroads — Bob Perry and Harold Simmons — have died since the 2012 campaign. In that election, many of the congressional candidates it backed — along with Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee for president — took a drubbing, raising questions about whether donors got much bang for their buck.

The group has also lost some of its most visible fund-raisers over time. Ed Gillespie, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, left in 2012 to join Mr. Romney’s campaign, and Haley Barbour, who also once held the chairman title and is a prodigious fund-raiser, departed in early 2013. A fund-raising advisory group formed by Crossroads after Mr. Barbour’s departure failed to accomplish much.

More recently, Carl Forti, the longtime Crossroads political director who simultaneously worked on the pro-Romney super PAC Restore our Future, in 2012, is said by four people with direct knowledge of the discussions to have been in talks with at least one 2016 campaign — that of Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, who is not yet an official candidate. Mr. Forti did not respond to an email seeking comment.

A history of personal tensions between Mr. Rove and Jeb Bush could further undercut the group’s role in the presidential race, should Mr. Bush emerge as his party’s nominee.

Although Mr. Rove was George W. Bush’s top political adviser, his relationship with Jeb Bush has long been described as strained. Mr. Rove was seen by Jeb Bush’s team as poaching some of their stump speech material when the two brothers were running for governor in Florida and in Texas in 1994, and relationships between him and Mike Murphy, Jeb Bush’s top strategist, have long been tense, although some say there has been a thaw of late.

And while Mr. Rove is beloved by a number of Republican donors, many grass-roots Republicans regard him as too closely tied to a presidency they see as having been insufficiently conservative.

Several donors who had grown familiar with the Crossroads pitches over the last four years said the group had been fairly quiet on the fund-raising circuit since the 2014 midterms. But Crossroads officials say that there is no threat to their fund-raising base, predicting that many donors will be willing to write two large checks — one to them and another to committees tied to a particular candidate. In 2014, Crossroads, despite a slow start, raised more than $100 million by November.

“People are as enthusiastic as ever about what we are trying to accomplish, and we are enjoying significant support from donors, including from those who have also supported specific presidential candidates,” said Ian Prior, a spokesman for Crossroads, who joined the organization this month in one of four new senior-level hirings.

Mr. Law said the group planned to double the number of staff members to about two dozen in the next nine months as it gears up for the election. But he would not say how much it hoped to raise.

Donald F. McGhan, a Republican campaign-finance lawyer, said it was not clear how those efforts would play out. “It’s really too early to tell this cycle who is going to be the dominant one and whether Crossroads is going to be more relevant or less relevant,” he said.

But Mel Sembler, a strong backer of Mr. Bush who is also involved with Crossroads, said speculation about the group’s changing role was exaggerated. He said that Crossroads was already drawing large numbers of donors who were also supporting Mr. Bush, and he predicted that would accelerate in the months ahead.

“Crossroads has been amazing,” he said, “in raising money and deploying it effectively.”

Anthony Scaramucci, a Republican donor and financier who is currently supporting Governor Walker, said he expected that Mr. Rove — and Crossroads — would find a way to maintain their influence.

“I would never underestimate him,” he said.

Eric Lichtblau reported from Washington, and Maggie Haberman from New York. Nicholas Confessore contributed reporting from New York.

Russia to adopt tough position if Ukraine defaults: PM Medvedev

May 23, 2015

Reuters

Russia would adopt a tough position if Ukraine decided not to pay off debts owed to Moscow by its previous government, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said in an interview broadcast by Russian TV on Saturday.

Russia has spoken out against a new Ukrainian law allowing a moratorium on foreign debt repayments, threatening to take Ukraine to court if it fails to repay $3 billion that Russia lent it in 2013.

In his interview, Medvedev called the new law “contradictory”.

“Probably they are talking about private debts, but at the same time they are hinting that they aren’t prepared to pay off the debts of the (former Ukrainian president Viktor) Yanukovich government,” Medvedev said.

“If it is actually formulated in this way this would undoubtedly be a default of Ukraine … We would adopt as tough a position as possible in this case and defend our national interests,” Medvedev told the Vesti on Saturday program on state TV channel Rossiya.

He added that any such refusal would “undoubtedly influence the process of their agreement with the International Monetary Fund” – a seeming reference to IMF rules that require financial assistance recipients to honor debts to other governments.

Medvedev also said that Russia was “not indifferent” to debts owed by Ukraine to private Russian creditors, as the bulk of these debts are owed to banks with state ownership.

“We will collect (the debts),” Medvedev said. “Banks will use all instruments that exist, including, naturally, judicial procedures,” he said.

“PREDICTABLE” ROUBLE

Medvedev also said his government had an interest in seeing a predictable rate for the rouble, but he defended the central bank’s policy of allowing the rouble to float, saying it was “optimal” to achieve a balance in the forex market between supply and demand.

Analysts have been speculating that the authorities are concerned the rouble has strengthened too much after the dollar fell below 50 rubles per dollar — a large rebound from the ruble’s all-time low of 80 in December.

Medvedev said the current exchange rate was “practically at the present moment the real value of the rouble.” But he added: “Some economists consider that this is even excessive strengthening.”

Reporting by Jason Bush; Editing by David Holmes and Raissa Kasolowsky

Insecure, narcissistic people more likely to post on Facebook – report

May 25. 2015

RT

People suffering from low self-esteem are more likely to post their relationship status on Facebook, a new study has found.

A report from Brunel University, published Friday, found that the popular Facebook “relationship status” feature was used by individuals with low self-esteem to generate attention to distract from their own feelings.

“People with low self-esteem are more likely to see the advantage of self-disclosing on Facebook rather than in person,” the report said.

However, rather than providing a boost of self-confidence, the romantic status posts “tend to be perceived as less likeable,” it added.

Data collected from a sample of 555 Facebook users took into account the frequency with which users engaged with the social network, whether or not they were involved in a relationship and the amount of time they spent checking Facebook.

“Sixty-five percent of participants were currently involved in a romantic relationship, and 34 percent had at least one child,” the report said.

A total of 57 percent checked Facebook on a daily basis, and spent an average of 108 minutes a day actively using it, it added.

The report also found that “narcissists” were likely to post about their achievements, rather than relationships, “indicating that narcissists’ boasting may be reinforced by the attention they crave.”

They were also more likely to post about health and fitness regimes “suggesting that they use Facebook to broadcast the effort they put into their physical appearance,” the report said.

Psychology lecturer Dr Tara Marshall, from Brunel University London, said: “It might come as little surprise that Facebook status updates reflect people’s personality traits. However, it is important to understand why people write about certain topics on Facebook because their updates may be differentially rewarded with ‘likes’ and comments.”

“People who receive more likes and comments tend to experience the benefits of social inclusion, whereas those who receive none feel ostracized,” she said.

“Although our results suggest that narcissists’ bragging pays off because they receive more likes and comments to their status updates, it could be that their Facebook friends politely offer support while secretly disliking such egotistical displays,” Marshall said.

“Greater awareness of how one’s status updates might be perceived by friends could help people to avoid topics that annoy more than they entertain.”

In the past, the links between usage of social media and emotional stability have been exploited by advertisers and social networks alike.

In July 2014, it was revealed that Facebook was performing manipulative social experiments on unknowing users.

The social media giant changed the information posted on 689,000 users’ home pages and discovered it was able to influence the way users felt via “emotional contagion.”

In their study, conducted with academics from Cornell University and the University of California, Facebook altered the levels of positive and negative “emotional content.”

This approach subtly changed users’ views so they found themselves posting more positive or negative content, depending on levels of exposure.

Activists criticized these social experiments as “dcandalous,” “spooky” and “disturbing.”

Greece says wants to make debt payments but needs aid urgently

May 25, 2015

by Renee Maltezou

Reuters

ATHENS | Greece intends to make good on its debt obligations but needs aid urgently to be able to do so, the government said on Monday, after several senior officials insisted Athens had no money to pay a loan installment falling due next week.

Shut out of bond markets and with bailout aid locked, Greece is running out of cash to pay its bills. It must repay four loans totaling 1.6 billion euros ($1.76 billion) to the International Monetary Fund next month, starting with a 300 million euro payment on June 5 that is seen as the next crunch point for state coffers.

Athens has the money to make monthly wage and pension payments this week, government spokesman Gabriel Sakellaridis told a news conference. But he was less direct when asked about the June 5 payment, reiterating the government’s official stance that it has the responsibility to pay all its obligations.

“Based on the liquidity problems that we have, there is an imperative need for us and the euro zone to have a deal as soon as possible,” Sakellaridis said. “To the degree to which we are able to pay our obligations, we will pay our obligations. It’s the government’s responsibility to be in a position to pay all of these obligations.”

A growing list of senior members of the government — the interior minister among them — have openly said Athens does not have the means to pay the IMF, and would prioritize paying civil servants and pensioners instead.

Greek officials have frequently threatened to default in recent weeks, arguing the country does not have cash, which euro zone officials have dismissed as a negotiating tactic to raise pressure on creditors to disburse aid.

Adding pressure on the government, prominent opposition lawmaker Dora Bakoyianni said the country risked facing capital controls to stem deposit outflows if it did not reach a deal for aid with the government this week.

Sakellaridis dismissed such “doomsday scenarios”, saying there was “just no chance” of imposing capital controls. He also dismissed reports that the government would try to pay all its June obligations in one lump sum to the IMF.

He voiced optimism about a deal by early June but acknowledged that agreement on value-added tax hikes, pension and labor reform and lower primary surplus targets had yet to be found in negotiations with EU and IMF lenders.

Canadian financier and Fairfax Financial Holdings Chief Executive Prem Watsa met Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras on Monday and expressed confidence in the country’s recovery and on a deal with lenders, even “at the last minute”.

Fairfax owns a 13.6 percent stake in the Greek lender Eurobank.

“A deal is possible because it is the only logical solution and both sides need it,” Watsa told Eurobank and other officials, according to a statement from the bank.

RED LINES

Not accepting cuts to wages and pensions has been one of the government’s so-called red lines in over four months of negotiations since taking power in January. Such cuts are a sensitive issue in a country where unemployment has soared and incomes have fallen during the six-year economic crisis.

Sakellaridis denied reports that the government was considering an extension to its bailout program that expires in June or that the idea had been proposed to the government.

Ahead of talks between technical teams from Greece and its creditors in the “Brussels Group” which resume on Tuesday, the country’s negotiating team convened to discuss the progress of the negotiations with Tsipras late on Monday.

VAT rates, pension reform as well fiscal targets remain open issues, a Greek government official said, and the two sides disagree over the size of the fiscal gap for this year – the lenders put it at 2 billion euros while Athens puts it at under 1 billion.

On Sunday, the ruling Syriza party’s central committee voted in favor of reaching a mutually beneficial solution with lenders.

A proposal by the party’s hard leftists stating that paying wages and pensions should be a priority versus external debt obligations if the liquidity crunch continues was rejected by 95 members, as many as 75 members voted in favor.

As US mass surveillance continues to make headlines, one man has had enough. Philip Zimmermann, creator of one of the most widely-used encryption systems, has moved his company to Switzerland, claiming societies need to “roll back” surveillance tactics.

Expressing his concerns about mass surveillance, Zimmerman told the Guardian that “every dystopian society has excessive surveillance, but now we see even Western democracies like the US and England moving that way.”

Zimmerman is the inventor of the encryption program Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), as well as the co-founder of three-year-old encryption start-up Silent Circle.

“We have to roll this back. People who are not suspected of committing crimes should not have information collected and stored in a database. We don’t want to become like North Korea,” the Internet Hall of Fame inductee continued.

Silent Circle will now operate from Switzerland – a move prompted by the 2013 Lavabit incident. The founder of Lavabit – which provided email addresses for 410,000 people including NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden – was served with a court order in 2013, requiring him to install surveillance equipment. This prompted him to close the service.

Zimmerman paid close attention to the situation, realizing that Washington could also serve Silent Circle – which offered voice, text, and email services – with the same order. He shut down the email service, wiped its database and never looked back.

Now the company is setting up its headquarters in Switzerland – where, according to Zimmerman, he is “less likely to encounter legal pressures.”

On its blog, Silent Circle credits Switzerland with having the “world’s most robust privacy laws,” adding that the company will continue to grow its Washington and London offices, but that “most of our new growth will take place in our new headquarters.”

While the Snowden revelations have opened the world’s eyes to mass surveillance, Zimmerman knew the possibilities all along.

The user manual for PGP, written in 1991 and updated seven years later, warns: “Today, email can be routinely and automatically scanned for interesting keywords, on a vast scale, without detection. This is like driftnet fishing.”

Perhaps it is this insight that has led to such widespread support for Silent Circle. Earlier this year, the encryption system raised US$50 million in a second round of outside funding.

In addition to Silent Circle and PGP, Zimmerman also played a role in developing Blackphone, the world’s most spy-resistant phone. In addition to its sealed operating system largely preventing data leaks, Silent Circle is used on the phone to encode all calls, texts, and contacts.

The second generation of the phone, costing around $700, is expected to be released this year, and will be followed by an attempt at a tablet device.

IRA killers may have been offered immunity

Lord Mountbatten’s murderer could be among ‘on the runs’ covered by secret deal

May 27, 2015

by Robert Mendick, Chief Reporter

The Telegraph/UK

IRA terror suspects, thought to include the alleged killers of Lord Mountbatten and a British ambassador, were secretly given assurances they were safe from prosecution, according to official documents obtained by The Telegraph.

The correspondence suggests the Irish government covertly put in place a scheme promising suspects they did not face arrest.

Until now, it was thought assurances were given to suspects – known as “on the runs” – only by the British Government during peace negotiations.

However, the minutes of meetings between senior British and Irish officials make it apparent that Ireland was already operating an informal scheme of its own.

It raises the prospect that IRA terrorists who committed atrocities in the Irish Republic – including the murders of Earl Mountbatten of Burma and Christopher Ewart-Biggs, the British ambassador to Ireland – were given assurances that they were not facing arrest.

The disclosure comes days after the Prince of Wales visited Mullaghmore, the village where his great-uncle Lord Mountbatten was murdered by the IRA when a bomb exploded on his boat.

In an eight-page memo written on May 3 2000, Sir Jonathan Stephens, then associate political director at the Northern Ireland Office, outlined discussions that had taken place at the Irish embassy in London the evening before.

He wrote: “On OTRs [on the runs], the British side undertook to operate the Irish procedure of clarifying the position of named individuals and reviewing cases where appropriate, but with no guarantees of the outcome: Sinn Fein want an undertaking that the general principle of not pursuing OTRs will be recognised by July.”

Sir Jonathan, now permanent secretary at the Northern Ireland Office, added under the subject heading OTRs: “Reflecting earlier discussions in Downing Street, Jonathan Powell [Tony Blair’s chief of staff] said we were prepared to operate a similar system to the Irish one. If we were given a list of names, we would clarify with the police and the prosecuting authorities the position of those individuals and, where appropriate, review whether it remained in the public interest to pursue a prosecution.”

Senior Irish government officials attended the talks at the embassy, and Sinn Fein was represented by Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams, its senior leaders.

In a second memo, sent to Mr Powell on Dec 6, 2000, an official in the Northern Ireland Office wrote of continuing discussions about on the runs: “The Irish plugged away at their Attorney-General’s idea of using the royal prerogative of mercy.”

Tony Blair ‘betrayed victims of IRA’

A senior Westminster source said: “These memos show that the British scheme was inspired by the Irish. It will lead to fears that suspects involved in the murder of Lord Mountbatten were given some form of immunity.

“Tony Blair wanted to wipe the slate clean for the whole of Northern Ireland and the Irish government were pulling the strings. This really shows the political interference in the Irish justice system.”

Kate Hoey, the former Labour minister and a member of the Northern Ireland Affairs Select Committee that investigated the on-the-run scheme in the last parliament, said: “This is something that our committee will be concerned about.

“There is clearly still a huge amount of information that the Irish government has chosen not to put in the public domain and until that happens, there will be inevitable speculation that suspects involved in terrible atrocities are wandering free.”

The existence of the British on-the-run scheme, secretly pushed through by Mr Blair, then prime minister, emerged only last year after the collapse of the trial of John Downey, who was charged with the murder of four soldiers in the Hyde Park bombing in 1982.

He had been given a “comfort letter” assuring him he was not wanted for any terrorist offence, leading to his trial being halted. The letters were issued to assuage Sinn Fein’s concerns that suspects on the run needed immunity from future prosecution after the Good Friday Agreement signed in 1998.

A former IRA member told The Telegraph he would be “very surprised” if Downey was not involved in Lord Mountbatten’s murder. Sean O’Callaghan, a convicted former IRA killer turned supergrass, said: “John Downey was running training camps in Donegal [at the time]. It is not conceivable in my mind that John Downey was not involved.

“I would be very surprised if John Downey was not in the loop. John Downey was knocking around the area at the time.”

According to Mr O’Callaghan, terror attacks carried out on Irish Republic soil had to be approved by the senior IRA leadership. Attacks were generally forbidden in the Irish Republic.

The murder of Lord Mountbatten in 1979, along with two teenage boys – one his grandson, the other a boat hand – would have been approved only after careful consideration by the IRA leadership. The only man convicted of the crime, the bomb-maker Thomas McMahon, was in custody at the time of the explosion, meaning accomplices must have detonated the device from the shore.

Francie Molloy, a Sinn Fein MP, said Mr O’Callaghan’s claim of Mr Downey’s possible involvement was “fanciful”. Mr Molloy said: “That is just an assumption he has made.”

Three years before Lord Mountbatten’s murder, Mr Ewart-Biggs, the British ambassador in Dublin, was assassinated when the car he was travelling in drove over a landmine. Another passenger, Judith Cooke, a Northern Ireland Office private secretary, was also killed.

Nobody has ever been convicted of the killings, again raising the possibility that suspects later received reassurances. In 2006, Foreign Office files disclosed that a partial fingerprint found at the scene matched Martin Taylor, an alleged IRA member suspected of running guns from the US. Mr Taylor has denied any involvement in the murders. The fingerprint, found on a crash helmet, was not considered strong enough evidence to bring a prosecution.

The Irish ministry of justice has denied sending specific “comfort letters” to suspects. A spokesman said: “The Good Friday Agreement, while dealing with the early release arrangements for convicted persons, did not address the issue of persons who might in the future face prosecution or conviction.

“It is a matter of record that over subsequent years it was recognised publicly by the governments in Ireland and the UK that dealing with these cases was a logical follow-on from the Good Friday provisions.”

The spokesman added: “There is not, and never has been, in operation here any form of amnesty for persons wanted for the commission of terrorist offences.

“An Garda Síochána [the Irish police] will pursue fully evidence which comes to light in relation to any cases, including the ones referred to. It would be a matter for the Director of Public Prosecutions alone to decide whether charges should be preferred in any case submitted to her.”

The Worst of All Possible Worlds:Did Market Leninism Win the Cold War?

by John Feffer

Tom Dispatch

Imagine an alternative universe in which the two major Cold War superpowers evolved into the United Soviet Socialist States. The conjoined entity, linked perhaps by a new Bering Straits land bridge, combines the optimal features of capitalism and collectivism. From Siberia to Sioux City, we’d all be living in one giant Sweden.

It sounds like either the paranoid nightmare of a John Bircher or the wildly optimistic dream of Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders.

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, however, this was a rather conventional view, at least among influential thinkers like economist John Kenneth Galbraith who predicted that the United States and the Soviet Union would converge at some point in the future with the market tempered by planning and planning invigorated by the market. Like many an academic notion, it didn’t come to pass. The United States veered off in the direction of Reaganomics. And the Soviet Union eventually collapsed. So much for “convergence theory,” which like EST or cold fusion went the way of most crackpot ideas.

Or did it? Take another look at our world in 2015 and tell me if, somehow we haven’t backed our way through the looking glass into that very alternative universe — with a twist. The planet currently seems to be on the cusp of a decidedly unharmonic convergence.

Consider what’s happening in Russia, where an elected autocrat presides over a free market shaped by a powerful state apparatus. Similarly, China’s mash-up of market Leninism offers a one-from-column-A-and-one-from-Column-B combination platter. Both countries are also rife with crime, corruption, growing inequality, and militarism. Think of them as the un-Swedens.

Nor do such hybrids live only in the East. Hungary, a member of the European Union and a key post-Communist adherent to liberalism, has been heading off in an altogether different direction since its ruling Fidesz party took over in 2010. Last July, its prime minister, Viktor Orban, declared that he no longer looks to the West for guidance. To survive in an ever more competitive global economy, Orban is seeking inspiration from various hybrid powers, the other un-Swedens of our planet: Turkey, Singapore, and both Russia and China. Touting the renationalization of former state assets and stricter controls on foreign investment, he has promised to remake Hungary into an “illiberal state” that both challenges laissez-faire principles and concentrates power in the leader and his party.

The United States is not exactly immune from such trends. The state has also become quite illiberal here as its reach and power have been expanded in striking ways. As it happens, however, America’s Gosplan, our state planning committee, comes with a different name: the military-industrial-homeland-security complex. Washington presides over a planet-spanning surveillance system that would have been the envy of the Communist apparatchiks of the previous century, even as it has imposed a global economic template on other countries that enables enormous corporate entities to elbow aside local competition. If the American tradition of liberalism and democracy was once all about “the little guy” — the rights of the individual, the success of small business — the United States has gone big in the worst possible way.

The convergence theorists imagined that the better aspects of capitalism and communism would emerge from the Darwinian competition of the Cold War and that the result would be a more adaptable and humane hybrid. It was a typically Panglossian error. Instead of the best of all possible worlds, the international community now faces an unholy trinity of authoritarian politics, cutthroat economics, and Big Brother surveillance. Even though we might all be eating off IKEA tableware, listening to Spotify, and reading the latest Girl With the Dragon Tattoo knock-off, we are not living in a giant Sweden. Our world is converging in a far more dystopian way. After two successive conservative governments and with a surging far-right party pounding its anti-immigrant drumbeat, even Sweden seems to be heading in the same dismal direction.

Indeed, if you squint at the history of the last 70 years, you might be persuaded to believe that the convergence theorists were right after all. For all the excitement the fall of the Berlin Wall generated and the paradigm shifts it inspired, the annus mirabilis of 1989 may not have been the end of one system and the victory of the other, but an odd interlude in a much longer evolution of the two.

Bats Do It, Whales Do It

Bats and whales don’t look at all alike. But they both operate in similarly dark environments. Bats hunt at night, while whales navigate the murk of the ocean. Because neither animal can rely on visual clues, they have developed the ability to echolocate, to use, that is, sound waves to find their way around. This clever strategy is an example of convergent evolution: adaptation by different creatures to similar environmental conditions.

Some social scientists in the Cold War period looked at Communism and capitalism in much the same way that evolutionary biologists view the bat and the whale. Both systems, while structurally different, were struggling to adapt to the same environmental factors. The forces of modernity — of technological development, of growing bureaucratization — would, it was then believed, push both systems in the same evolutionary direction. To achieve more optimal economic results, the Communists would increasingly rely on market mechanisms, while the capitalists would turn to planning. Democracy would take a backseat to bureaucracy as technocrats with no particular ideology ran the countries in both blocs in that now-distant two-superpower world. What would be lost in participation would be gained, it was claimed, in efficiency. The resulting hybrid structures, like echolocation, would represent the most effective ways to operate in a challenging global environment.

Convergence theory officially debuted in 1961 with a short but influential article by Jan Tinbergen. Communism and capitalism, the Dutch economist argued, would learn to overcome internal problems by borrowing from each other. More contact between the two foes would lead to a virtuous circle of more sharing and greater convergence. Further exposure came with John Kenneth Galbraith’s 1967 bestseller, The New Industrial State. From there, the concept spread beyond the economics profession and the transatlantic alliance. It even found adherents, among them nuclear physicist and dissident Andrei Sakharov in the Soviet Union.

In the 1970s, the coming of détente between the two superpowers suggested that these theorists had been on the mark. Policies emphasizing “coexistence,” adopted by each of the previously implacable enemies and facilitated by scientific exchanges and arms control treaties, seemed to herald a narrowing of differences. In the United States, even Republicans like Richard Nixon began to embrace wage and price controls in an effort to tame the market, while the rise of cybernetics suggested that computers might overcome the technical difficulties that socialist countries faced in creating efficient planned economies. In fact, with Project Cybersyn, an early 1970s effort to harness the power of semiconductors to regulate supply and demand, the government of Chile’s democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende planned to usher in just such a technotopia.

Of course, Allende went down in a U.S.-backed military coup. Détente between the two superpowers collapsed in the late 1970s and, under the sway of Reaganism, American government officials began to dismantle the welfare state. At the same time, the Soviet Union, now headed by aged bureaucratic leaders like Leonid Brezhnev, sank into an economic funk before Mikhail Gorbachev made one last desperate, failed effort to preserve the system through a program of reforms. In 1991, the Soviet Union disappeared and the victory of rampant global capitalism was proclaimed.

Not surprisingly, in the early 1990s several scholars wrote epitaphs for what clearly seemed to be a conceptual dead end. Convergence was dead. Long live, well what?

The Short-Lived End of History

Even as convergence theory was bowing out ungracefully, political theorist Francis Fukuyama was reinventing the concept. In the summer of 1989, with his controversial essay “The End of History” in which he proclaimed the eternal triumph of liberal democracy (and the economic system that went with it), he anticipated the central question of the era: What would replace the ideological confrontation of the Cold War?

Several months before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the outbreak of the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, Fukuyama argued that Communism would no longer pose an alternative to liberal democracy and that the European Union, the “universal homogeneous state” of his philosophical mentor, Alexandre Kojève, would ultimately be victorious. The endpoint of global political and economic evolution, in other words, was once again a political bureaucracy and an economic welfare state patterned on European social democracy. For Fukuyama, the tea leaves were clear: convergence was back as the way of the future.

What would have thrilled the architects of European integration — and the likes of Jan Tinbergen and John Kenneth Galbraith — was, however, a grave disappointment for Fukuyama, who was already in a premature state of mourning for the heroism that epic confrontations inspired. The ideological conflict that had given shape to the Cold War and meaning to all those who fought in its political and military skirmishes would, he feared, be defused and diminished. All that might then be left would be polite exchanges over minor disagreements in a boardroom in Brussels. The end of history, indeed!

Soon enough, Fukuyama’s thesis, briefly hailed here as the endpoint of all speculation about our global fate, came up visibly short as other potent ideologies reemerged to challenge the generally liberal democratic ethos of the West. There were, as a start, the virulent strains of ethno-nationalism that tore Yugoslavia apart and continued to rage across the expanse of the former Soviet Union. Similarly, religious fundamentalism, especially Islamic extremism, challenged the hard power, the multicultural ethos, even the very existence of various secular states across the Middle East and Africa. And the row of Communist dominoes toppling eastward stopped at Mongolia. China, North Korea, Laos, and Vietnam at least nominally retained their governing ideologies and their single party structures.

At the same time, the European Union expanded, absorbing all of East-Central Europe (except for a couple of small Balkan states), even incorporating the Baltic countries from the former Soviet Union. Convergence, Fukuyama-style, came in the form of acceding to the requirements of EU membership, a lengthy process that reshaped the political, economic, and social structures of its eastern aspirants. The war in Yugoslavia eventually ended, and Europe seemed to have avoided a much deeper clash of civilizations. Even in Bosnia, the Orthodox, Muslim, and Catholic factions achieved a grudging modus operandi, though the country remains far from a well-functioning entity.

Fukuyama had, in fact, suggested a variant of convergence theory — that it would take the form of absorption. In this more ruthless narrative of evolution, the blue whale survives as the largest leviathan of the deep, while the immense shark-like Megalodon disappears. The Soviet Union made its bid for the proletariat of the world to unite and push capitalism into extinction. It failed. Instead, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany vindicated the capitalist theorists. So did the absorption of East-Central Europe into the European Union.

And once again, that was supposed to be the end of the story. The EU would be a diluted version of the Sweden that the original convergence theorists had posited — generally peaceful, modestly prosperous, and passably democratic. The “common European home,” which Gorbachev invoked at the peak of his prestige, might one day even include Russia to the east and transatlantic partner America to the west.

Today, however, that common European home is on the verge of foreclosure. It’s not just that Russia is heading off in an entirely different direction or that the United States recoils from even the weak Scandinavian social democracy that the EU promulgates. Greece is contemplating what once was heresy, its own Grexit or departure from the Eurozone. More troubling, in the very heart of Europe in Budapest, Viktor Orban is turning his back on the West and facing East, while anti-EU, anti-immigrant right-wing parties are gaining adherents across the continent. A new axis of illiberalism might one day connect Beijing to Moscow, Hungary, and possibly beyond like a new trans-Siberian express. The vast Eurasian landmass, the historic pivot of geopolitics, is sinking into despotism with a corporate face and cosmetic democracy.

And Hungary is no European outlier, despite the EU’s censure of Orban’s authoritarian tendencies. Other leaders in the region, from the conservative Jaroslaw Kaczynski in Poland to the social democrat Robert Fico in Slovakia, look enviously at Orban’s model and his political success. Euroskepticism is spreading westward, with the far Right poised to take over in Denmark, the National Front capturing the most seats in the last European parliamentary elections in France, and the recently victorious Conservative Party in Great Britain planning to go ahead with a referendum on continued membership in the EU.

In other words, a geopolitical game of Go is underway. And just when you thought that the liberal pieces had spread successfully from the Atlantic to the western edge of Russia — and under former Russian leader Boris Yeltsin possibly to the very shores of the Pacific — the anti-liberals made a few key moves on the margins and the board began to shift in their favor. Croatia’s entrance into the EU in 2013 may well have been the high-water mark for that structure. An economic crisis in Greece, a political crisis in Great Britain, and a liberal crisis in Hungary could combine to unravel the most upbeat scenario for the recrudescence of convergence theory.

With the EU potentially on its way out, brace yourself for something considerably less anodyne.

Convergence American-Style

The United States prides itself on being an exception to the rules, hence the endless emphasis by American political leaders of every stripe on the country’s “exceptionalism.” The U.S. remains the world’s only true superpower. It refuses to sign a range of international treaties. It reserves the right to invade other countries and even assassinate its own citizens if necessary. How could such a unique entity converge toward anything else?

These days, it’s usually just right-wing nuts who sound like old-fashioned convergence theorists. They’re the ones who label President Obama a secret agent of European socialism and believe that his health care plan will pollute the country’s precious bodily fluids, much as Dr. Strangelove’s General Jack D. Ripper worried about fluoridation. Despite the ornate fantasies of such figures, the United States has clearly moved in the opposite direction. Today’s Democrats are considerably more conservative economically than the Republicans of the 1970s and the Republicans have effectively purged all moderates from their ranks in their surge rightward.

Instead of converging toward Scandinavian socialism, the U.S. has been slouching toward illiberalism for some time now. The Tea Party bemoans the “nanny” and “gun-control” state, but misses the deeply sinister ways in which that state has been captured by the forces of illiberality. The United States has expanded its archipelago of incarceration, our homegrown gulag, so dramatically that we have more people in prison — in total and by percentage of population — than any developed country on Earth. Our political system has been taken over by a club of the rich — our own nomenklatura — with corruption so embedded that no one dares call it by that name and critics instead speak of the “revolving door” and “voter suppression” and the “influence of money in politics.” The deterioration of public infrastructure has, as in the Soviet Union in the 1970s, turned the country into an embarrassment of falling bridges, exploding gas lines, bursting pipelines, backward railroads, unsecured power plants, and potential ecological catastrophes.

Add in spreading governmental surveillance and secrecy, unsustainable military spending, and a disastrously interventionist, military-first foreign policy and the United States is looking a lot like either the old Soviet Union or the Russia of today. Neither is a flattering comparison. America has not yet descended into despotism, so the convergence is hardly complete. But it might be only one right-wing populist leader away from that worst-case scenario.

Where Does History End?

In the long sweep of history, development is not a one-way street that leads all traffic toward a single destination. No doubt the Romans in the first century AD and the Ottomans of the sixteenth century imagined that their glorious futures would be full of successful Caesars and sultans. They didn’t anticipate any great leaps backwards, much less the future collapse of each of their systems. Why should the EU or the American colossus be exempt from history’s serpentine ways?

And yet America consoles itself that what’s happening in Russia and China is only a temporary detour. Fukuyama might have been premature in his 1989 declaration of history’s end, but his historical determinism remains deeply imbedded in how Western liberal elites look at the world. They sit back and wait impatiently for countries to “come to their senses” and become “more like us.” They arrogantly expect convergence by absorption to proceed, if not tomorrow then eventually.

But if, in fact, the signs along the highway are not all pointing toward the same destination, then maybe we should stop checking our watches to see when North Korea will finally collapse, the Chinese Communist Party implode, and Putinism grind to a halt. These are not evolutionary dead-ends awaiting another political meteor, like the one in 1989, to strike the planet and wipe them out. For all we know, they might even outlive their Western challengers. The Chinese hybrid, for instance, seems no less stable at the moment than any liberal democracy, particularly now that its economy has surpassed that of the U.S. to become the largest in the world. Nor does Beijing appear to be intent on ending its one-party rule any time soon.

Convergence theorists expected that certain global trends, from technological innovation to economic development, would push different ideological systems toward a merger at some point in the future. They may well have been right about the mechanism, but wrong about the results. A different set of factors — global financial crisis, widening economic inequality, increasingly scarce natural resources, anti-immigrant hysteria, persistent religious extremism, and widespread dissatisfaction with electoral democracy — is pushing countries toward a considerably less harmonic kind of convergence. Forget about the “new industrial state.” Welcome to the new post-industrial despotism.

The ongoing convulsions of geopolitics are throwing up all manner of new hybrids. Many of these market authoritarian regimes are deeply troubling, the offspring of a marriage of the less savory aspects of collectivism and capitalism. But they are also potent reminders that, because we are not the slaves of history, we can transform our putatively triumphant liberalism, with all its manifold defects of corruption, inequality, and unsustainability, into something more optimal for both human beings and the planet. The bats did it, the whales did it, and even though it’s not inevitable, we humans can do it, too.

John Feffer is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies,

Criminals access 100,000 IRS tax returns

May 27, 2015

BBC News

A security breach has allowed criminals to access the tax returns of more than 100,000 people in the United States.

It appears that the criminals used stolen personal data taken from other websites that had been hacked, to pretend to be legitimate users.

The Internal Revenue Service was warned of the potential for unauthorised access to the accounts in March.

The online IRS’ Get Transcript app involved in the breach has been shut down and an investigation is underway.

Organised Crime

The scam’s perpetrators managed to set up fake tax returns and file for tax refunds. The IRS told the New York Times that it had paid nearly $50m (£32.5m) in refunds before it had detected the scheme.

The IRS says more than 200,000 attempts to view past tax returns using stolen information were made from February to mid-May with around half of those being successful.

“We’re confident that these are not amateurs,” said John Koskinen, the IRS commissioner.

“These actually are organized crime syndicates that everybody in the financial industry is dealing with.”

Security experts are concerned that the IRS’ system appeared not to use multi-factor identification, for example sending a one-off code to a users’ mobile phone for them to tap into the website, so as to verify that the person giving the information has access to the phone number on record.

Previous warning

The cybersecurity blog Krebs on Security warned in March that the IRS’ system could be breached when it reported on the case of Michael Kasper, who had tried to file his tax return only to be told that he had already done so.

In that case criminals had set up an account in Mr Kasper’s name using his social security number, but with a different email address. They filed a false tax return in order to claim a tax refund and had conned the IRS into paying that “refund” into a bank account that Mr Kasper did not recognise.

“The IRS’ process for verifying people … is vulnerable to exploitation by fraudsters because it relies on static identifiers and so-called “knowledge-based authentication” — ie challenge questions that can be easily defeated with information widely available for sale in the cybercrime underground and/or with a small amount of searching online,” said the security website, commenting on Mr Kasper’s case.

The IRS has sent letters to the taxpayers whose accounts had been compromised, and said it would offer them free credit monitoring.

The authority said its main computer system, which handles tax filings, had not been breached.

Russia’s Oil and Gas Activities in the Arctic

by Malte Humpert

The Arctic Institute

As the U.S. and E.U. keep a very close eye on the situation with Russia and Ukraine, Russia is also increasing its presence and influence elsewhere: the Arctic – a melting region that is opening up prime shipping lanes and real estate with an estimated $1 trillion in hydrocarbons.[1] With the opening of two major shipping routes, the North Sea route and the Northwest Passage, the potential for economic competition is fierce, especially among the eight members of the Arctic council: Canada, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Finland, Sweden, Russia, and the United States.[2]

President Putin made statements this week concerning Russia’s national interests in the Arctic region: chiefly, militarization and the preparation of support elements for commercial shipping routes.[3] The Russian President called for full government funding for “socio-economic development” from 2017-2020, including a system of Russian naval bases that would be home to ships and submarines allocated specifically for the defense of national interests that involve the protection of Russian oil and gas facilities in the Arctic.[4] Russia is also attempting to accelerate the construction of more icebreakers to take part in its Arctic strategy.[5]

The Russian Federation recently staked a territorial claim in the Sea of Okhotsk for 52,000 square kilometers,[6] and is currently preparing an Arctic water claim for 1.2 million square kilometers.[7] The energy giant owns 43 of the approximate 60 hydrocarbon deposits in the Arctic Circle.[8] With Russian energy companies already developing hydrocarbon deposits and expanding border patrols on its Arctic sea shelf (in place by July 1, 2014),[9] Putin is actively pursuing a strong approach to the Arctic region. Russian oil fields, which significantly contribute to the country’s revenue, are in decline – forcing Russian oil companies to actively explore the Arctic region.[10] While the U.S. Defense Secretary called for a peaceful and stable Arctic region with international cooperation, the Arctic has created increased militarization efforts, particularly by Russia.

Already the Arctic has seen powerful warships of Russia’s Northern Fleet, strategic bomber patrols, and airborne troop exercises.[11] In fact, Russian military forces have been permanently stationed in the Arctic since summer 2013.[12] According to a source in the Russian General Staff, a new military command titled Northern Fleet – Joint Strategic Command, will be created and tasked to protect Russian interests in its Arctic territories; a strategy that was approved in 2009.[13] Furthermore, weapons developers are being tasked with creating products that can face the harsh Arctic environment. According to an RT report, “Putin ordered the head of the Russian arms industry, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, to concentrate the efforts on creation of Arctic infrastructure for the soonest deployment of troops. Rogozin reported that all Russian weapons systems can be produced with special features needed in the extreme North and the weapons companies were ready to supply such arms to the Defense Ministry.”[14]

The “Arctic infrastructure” that Rogozin refers to will include Navy and Border Guard Service bases.[15] These bases are part of Putin’s aim to strengthen Russian energy companies and military positions in the Arctic region. In 2013, a formerly closed down base was reopened in the Novosibirsk Islands and is now home to 10 military ships and four icebreakers – a move that Reuters called “a demonstration of force.”[16] The Defense Ministry is also planning on bringing seven airstrips in the Arctic back to life.[17]

Russia’s militarization in the Arctic region is only a part of its increasing activity throughout the globe. Vice Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said, “It’s crucially important for us to set goals for our national interests in this region. If we don’t do that, we will lose the battle for resources which means we’ll also lose in a big battle for the right to have sovereignty and independence.”[18] On the contrary, Aleksandr Gorban, a representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry is quoted saying that a “war for resources”[19] in the Arctic will never happen.

But what was once a more hands-off region of the world that provided international cooperation and stability is now turning into a race for sovereignty and resources claims – as evidenced not only by Russia’s increasing military presence, but also Canada and the United States. Canada is now allocating part of its defense budget towards armed ships that will patrol its part of the Arctic Circle,[20] while the United States has planned a strategy of its own. In addition to conducting military exercises with other Arctic nation members, the U.S. Navy has proposed a strategy titled The United States Navy Arctic Roadmap for 2014 to 2030 that was released in February 2014. The 2013 National Strategy for the Arctic Region, cited in the Arctic Roadmap, provides the Navy’s two specific objectives for the Arctic: 1) advance United States’ security interests; and 2) strengthen international cooperation.[21] According to the strategy, the Navy’s role will primarily be in support of search and rescue, law enforcement, and civil support operations.[22] However, this may grow to a more militarized strategy depending on the U.S. government’s view of Russia’s increased military activity in the Arctic region over the next few years. In either case, the U.S. is falling behind in Arctic preparation. It has very few operational icebreakers for the Arctic region where its only primary presence is seen through nuclear submarines and unmanned aerial vehicles, according to an RT article.[23] Until 2020, the Navy will primarily use its submarines and limited air assets in the Arctic, while its mid-term and far-term strategy emphasizes personnel, surface ships, submarines, and air assets that will be prepared for Arctic conditions and operations.[24] Despite its mid and long-term strategy, the U.S. will already be lagging in establishing a military presence to compete with Russia’s, who already has strategies in motion until 2020 and later.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called for a united Canadian-U.S. counterbalance to Russia’s Arctic presence, pointing out “they have been aggressively reopening military bases.”[25] While the U.S. cannot legitimately criticize Putin for opening military bases and simultaneously avoid blatant hypocrisy, it is worth noting that Russia is developing a strong military presence in a potentially competitive region. Russia’s plans to reopen bases and create an Arctic military command fosters the conclusion that Russia wants to be the first established dominant force in a new region that will host economic competition and primary shipping lanes, albeit in a harsh environment that makes it difficult to extract resources. Nicholas Cunningham aptly stated “both Russia and the West fear losing out to the other in the far north, despite what appears to be a small prize.”[26]

Although the Arctic holds a mass of the world’s oil and gas deposits, the extreme environment and remote location makes it difficult to produce energy quickly and efficiently. Despite this, the Russian Federation is focused on developing disputed hydrocarbon areas that it claims are part of the country’s continental shelf. In addition, Russia is allocating funds and forces to the Arctic to protect its interests. While the U.S. is currently lacking in natural resource development and exploitation in the Arctic Circle, it desires to display a show of strength in the cold region to compete with potential Russian domination and influence. But because the Defense Department faces constant budget cuts, preparing an Arctic naval force will be slow and difficult. For now, the United States can only show strength through nuclear submarines and drone technology.

Putin and the Russian Federation are laying disputed claims to territories both inside and outside the Arctic while creating the foundation for a potential military buildup in the Arctic – provided that the U.S. and Canada can even allocate sufficient budgets for Arctic military expansion. One thing is sure: if the Arctic region continues to melt and open up vital shipping lanes, there must be international cooperation to provide security and rescue elements for commercial shipping. Since Russia has significant territorial claims and the most coastlines in the Arctic Circle, it would be natural for the Russian Federation to have a wide security presence in the region, but this must be coupled with international cooperation in commercial shipping lanes and by providing support elements, such as search and rescue. The United States will not be able to fully compete with a country that is heavily investing in the Arctic region – particularly due to budget constraints and lack of Arctic-prepared vessels. If the U.S. desires to limit Russian influence and territorial claims, it must do so by partnering with other members of the Arctic council – not by entering into a military buildup simply to dominate Russia in the Arctic.

Your Data is Showing: Breaches Wreak Havoc While the Government Plays Catch-Up

May 27, 2015

by Farai Chideya

The Intercept

When Kansas City, Missouri, real estate appraiser Dave Markus learned he was one of about 80 million people whose personal data was exposed in the Anthem health insurance breach discovered at the end of January, he immediately signed up for an identity protection service. But then he got a letter from the IRS in March. “Basically they said, ‘Before we send you your return, we want you to get ahold of us and verify your identity for your 2014 return.’ But we hadn’t filed yet.”

His wife spent time in “IRS voicemail hell.” She, and later he, went to the local office, where they were told to file a paper return, including photocopies of their drivers licenses and social security cards. It’s not clear whether the Anthem breach was even related to Markus’s tax woes. As in many cases of identity theft, which data breach was the cause will never be known. And the local IRS officials seemed confounded as to who should get involved. “They wanted me to file a police report with St. Louis,” Markus recalls. “And I said ‘Why?’ Are they going to fly to Shanghai or St. Petersburg or wherever these guys are?’”

Markus’s predicament is increasingly common. Just this week, news broke that criminals penetrated the IRS to pilfer nearly $50 million in refunds that belonged to more than 100,000 taxpayers. The agency claimed the perpetrators had seized data from other breaches. “These are extremely sophisticated criminals with access to a tremendous amount of data,” said an IRS spokesperson on Tuesday. The tax breach has drawn fire from critics who say that the government should have done a better job protecting citizens’ data. For its part, the IRS reiterates that it’s been facing cyberthreats in an environment of budget cuts, which since 2010 have cut 10,000 jobs from its enforcement staff.

In the past two years alone, well over 100 million people have gotten a letter, call or email notifying that they’ve been victims of a data breach. In some cases, key personal data has been exposed by retailers, including Target; for others, it’s health insurance companies including Anthem, or employers like Sony. Companies are paying a financial price, but in the end it may be relatively modest, and not enough to encourage better data protection practices. For example, Target has incurred more than $250 million in breach-related expenses, according to SEC filings, but only a fraction of that has been committed to consumers. The company agreed to a proposed class-action settlement for $10 million in March, which specified up to $10,000 for each person who could prove they had suffered clear damages and the rest to be split among other victims of the breach, which, if spread across all possible class members, would be less than a dollar a person. Benjamin Dean, a fellow for cybersecurity and Internet governance at Columbia University’s SIPA, wrote, “When we subtract insurance reimbursement, the losses fall to $162 million. If we subtract tax deductions (yes, breach-related expenses are deductible), the net losses tally $105 million. This is the equivalent of 0.1% of 2014 sales.”

In the meantime, both courts and consumers are faced with a quandary. Data leaked now could be used a decade or more hence, and both courts and individuals are left calculating probable future risk as well as current exposure. Consumers face limited options for protecting themselves. A telling measure of frustration is a syndrome that has been termed “data breach fatigue.” A third of people notified about a breach don’t take any action at all, according to a 2014 study by the Ponemon Institute.

In our age of big data, individuals are extremely vulnerable to breaches, but both government and corporations have an interest in collecting as much personal information as possible, from our shopping habits to our cellphone metadata. Columbia’s Benjamin Dean said he questions whether “opaque information sharing arrangements between companies and intelligence agencies” undermine the government’s incentive to advocate for consumer privacy protections. For example, the federal government can not only ask for data about consumers using platforms like Facebook and Amazon, but also require those companies to shroud the details of how many national security-related requests were made. That’s in addition to revelations that the government hacked the world’s largest SIM card manufacturer, giving intelligence agencies the capacity to access a large portion of the world’s cell phone users’ communications.

To be fair, the government has taken some of the right steps. The variety of federal agencies that deal with cybercrime in one form or the other is staggering — including the FBI, IRS and Department of Homeland Security. Some are more hands-on with consumers than others. The IRS said it stopped 19 million suspicious returns between 2011 and October 2014. Notwithstanding the recent breach, the agency says it prevented almost 3 million suspicious returns this year. Tax identity theft victims like Dave Markus of Kansas City are offered the chance to get an IRS Identity Protection PIN — a six-digit code that tax filers can use along with their social security number. So far, 1.5 million people affected by tax identity theft have signed up for the IP PIN program, which allows them to file more securely.

But as Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says, “We’ve always known that [federal] entities have internally conflicting missions. On the one hand they do enforce privacy laws and secure networks. But when they go after bad guys, their job is to infiltrate. They are dual-hatted.”

The Legal process around big data breaches typically unfolds in a now-familiar pattern: victims claim that companies could have been more secure; the companies argue most or all of the people exposed haven’t been harmed; both parties settle out of court. Litigation against Sony, which, according to the U.S. government, was targeted by hackers in North Korea over the movie The Interview, is ongoing. The plaintiffs in one class-action suit describe their exposure as “an epic nightmare,” saying that Sony “failed to secure its computer systems, servers and databases, despite weaknesses that it has known about for years.” The data revealed included mortifying in-house memos between studio executives (including Amy Pascal, who was forced out as chair), but more importantly for employees at large, 47,000 social security numbers, plus medical and salary records. Sony, which refused to comment for this article, said in a filing to dismiss, “There are no allegations of identity theft, no allegations of fraudulent charges, and no allegations of misappropriation of medical information.” Instead, the plaintiffs assert a broad range of common-law and statutory causes of action based on their alleged fear of an increased risk of future harm, as well as expenses they claim to have incurred to prevent that future harm.

Anthem, the healthcare company whose breach affected 80 million, declined an interview request but emailed a statement which read in part, “To date, in working with the FBI, we have found no evidence that the cyber attackers have shared or sold any of our members’ data and there is no evidence that fraud has occurred against our members, including fraudulent tax returns.” An FBI spokesperson confirmed the bureau hadn’t, so far, found that attackers sold or shared data. But it wouldn’t weigh in on the assertion that no fraud had occurred.

During a Securities and Exchange Commission roundtable last year, attorney Douglas Meal raised a troubling possibility: What if companies just didn’t disclose data breaches? Meal, who consulted with Target — whose 2013 data breach exposed information from 40 million credit cards and data from approximately 70 million shoppers — told the SEC, “I think, just to be someone speaking from the trenches … there is a tremendous disincentive to disclose a breach,” adding the qualifiers, “if the breach isn’t otherwise going to become public” and “if a company can conclude that it doesn’t otherwise have a disclosure obligation.” In his words, once a breach is disclosed, “you are now going to be a target of a lot of class-action plaintiffs, of consumer protection regulators, who will not look at you as the victim of the breach … but will look at you as almost the perpetrator.” Target reacted by saying they favored prompt disclosure — but Meal had spelled out logic that could well appeal to other firms facing a similar predicament. And of course, we’d never know.

The EFF’s Tien says that keeping data breaches secret from consumers was a common corporate strategy until state regulators began to demand disclosure. (All but three states now have disclosure laws.) And there’s new legislation pending in Congress, including HR 1770, the Data Security and Breach Notification Act of 2015, that would require consumer notification in all states and the District of Columbia. Yet some lawmakers point out the bill actually weakens existing state-level provisions. Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., stated that the bill would “weaken existing state law in 38 states,” and in some cases, “this bill would prevent you from being notified about breaches for which your state currently requires notification.” The pending legislation also leaves out the stickier question of what data privacy practices should be in place to prevent breaches from happening, or appropriate legal liability and penalties when breaches occur. “The current legal system has a short circuit because it doesn’t give companies very much incentive to address this,” says Tien.

Are there paths to better data security for citizens and customers? Right now, several countries including the U.S., the U.K. and Australia that are at the crossroads of commerce, travel and immigration have aggressively pursued access to citizen data. On the other hand, Columbia’s Benjamin Dean applauds the X-Road system of the relatively tiny Estonia (population 1.3 million) for allowing “secure and confidential sharing of information.” X-Road is designed so that data can be securely verified across government agencies without that information being held in a central repository. For example, a citizen can link bank data to a national healthcare system, or quickly validate his or her ID at the border. While some other European nations are experimenting with the X-Road platform, a country like the United States would potentially have to submit to limitations on its direct access to citizen information in order to participate or duplicate this type of effort.

Meanwhile, individuals are triaging data notices and personal concerns. Rochelle and Paul (last names withheld) found out they were compromised in the Anthem breach at the same time that they were moving Rochelle’s father into assisted living. Two weeks later, she says, “someone’s opened a Paypal Credit account in Paul’s name and charged $682 from a place called Modern Coin.” They called Paypal Credit to close the account, followed up with Anthem, and, via Anthem, got 24 months of credit monitoring from AllClear ID. “But I failed to jump into action immediately. We gave this asshole, whoever opened up the Paypal Credit, the opportunity to do that,” Rochelle says.

While it would be easy to blame consumers — saying they should monitor their information more closely — the problem of data theft is endemic, and frustration is justified. The EFF’s Tien says, “Back in the day we’d be asked, ‘What are the 10 things a consumer can do to protect themselves?’ I hate to be a gloomy Gus, but the message I give journalists and others is there’s basically nothing you can do. It’s like saying, what can you do about climate change by yourself … when the problem is structural architecture and the flow around your data.” (The EFF does offer individuals Privacy Badger, a tool that blocks third parties from tracking which sites you visit as you surf the Internet.) Politicians, Tien notes, including the first successful data miner in chief, President Obama, have “very mixed incentives about stomping on this area

Washington, D.C. May 18, 2015: “Massive global political upheavals, diminishing food and water supplies and other factors are driving immense legions of Third World inhabitants into seeking refuge in more advanced countries, especially noted being armies of African inhabitants fleeing to Europe. There, they form unassimilated communities, clog the welfare rolls and create growing hostility from the natives of their countries of refuge. There are growing, and strong, anti-immigrant movements in Europe and also the United States, movements that are viewed by the media and its controllers as Naughty-Naughty-No-Nos and shoved under the carpet. The media, utterly worthless as a source of accurate news, shoves other such subjects under their rat-infested carpets of silence but the Internet has become a serious threat to them and it is there that much more accurate information can be found.”

The Computers are ListeningSpeech Recognition is NSA’s Best-Kept Open Secret Part 2

May 11, 2015

by Dan Froomkin

The Intercept

Researchers in the field are divided between those who don’t take NSA funding, and can only speculate about what goes on over there — and those who do take NSA funding, but won’t say what they know.

“There’s a lot of weird hush-hush that goes on,” said Bhiksha Raj, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Language Technologies Institute, who said he does not receive NSA funding. “Academics who work for the NSA must go through various clearances. They sign several papers. They hold closed meetings that are only attended by people with clearances.”

Some non-NSA affiliated academics were once “quite keen” on seeing how the NSA was faring in the face of the technical challenges in the field, Steve Young, a professor of information engineering at the University of Cambridge, recalled. “But unless you actually work for the NSA and you’ve been vetted, you’re not going to get close to the real data.”

Ironically, even GCHQ, NSA’s intelligence partner in the U.K., has complained about DARPA and NSA’s secrecy. A 2009 GCHQ assessment of speech-to-text technology said that “The DARPA evaluation programme, with significant steer from NSA, has been the main driving force behind technology improvements in the field. Unfortunately, the results of the evaluations are not put in the public domain, making reference difficult.”

All the secrecy has an obvious advantage for the NSA. If the NSA can keep their speech-recognition capabilities secret, nobody can tell them what to do. And if nobody knows what they are doing, then nobody can tell them to stop.

Senator Ron Wyden, D-Ore., arguably the foremost congressional critic of NSA overreach, wouldn’t comment directly on the question of speech recognition. But, he said through a spokesperson: “After 14 years on the Intelligence Committee, I’ve learned that senators must be constantly on the lookout for secret interpretations of the law and advances in surveillance that Congress isn’t aware of.”

He added: “For centuries, individual privacy was protected in part by the limited resources of governments. It simply wasn’t possible for governments to secretly collect information on every single citizen without investing in massive networks of spies and informants. But in the 21st century mass surveillance is no longer difficult and expensive — it’s increasingly cheap and easy. The only privacy protections that will matter in the future are the ones that are written into law and defended by public demand for freedom and openness.”

Research on the Snowden archive was conducted by Intercept researcher Andrew Fishman.

Siri can understand what you say. Google can take dictation. Even your new smart TV is taking verbal orders.

So is there any doubt the National Security Agency has the ability to translate spoken words into text?

But precisely when the NSA does it, with which calls, and how often, is a well-guarded secret.

It’s not surprising that the NSA isn’t talking about it. But oddly enough, neither is anyone else: Over the years, there’s been almost no public discussion of the NSA’s use of automated speech recognition.

One minor exception was in 1999, when a young Australian cryptographer named Julian Assange stumbled across an NSA patent that mentioned “machine transcribed speech.”

Assange, who went on to found WikiLeaks, said at the time: “This patent should worry people. Everyone’s overseas phone calls are or may soon be tapped, transcribed and archived in the bowels of an unaccountable foreign spy agency.”

The most comprehensive post-Snowden descriptions of NSA’s surveillance programs are strangely silent when it comes to speech recognition. The report from the President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies doesn’t mention it, and neither does the October 2011 FISA Court ruling, or the detailed reports from the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board.

There is some mention of speech recognition in the “Black Budget” submitted to Congress each year. But there’s no clear sign that anybody on the Hill has ever really noticed.

As The Intercept reported on Tuesday, items from the Snowden archive document the widespread use of automated speech recognition by the NSA.

The strategic advantage, invasive potential and policy implications of being able to turn spoken words into text are not trivial: Suddenly, voice conversations, historically considered ephemeral and unsearchable, can be scanned, catalogued and archived — not perfectly, but well enough to dramatically increase the effective scope of eavesdropping.

“You’re seeing a black hole,” Drake told The Intercept. “That means there’s something there that’s really significant. You’re seeing some of the fuzzy contours of this whole other program.”

Not Technically a Secret

The NSA’s ability to turn voice into text, interestingly enough, is not technically a secret.

And speech recognition technology has been heavily — and openly — funded by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) since the early 1970s.

The latest of DARPA’s many public research projects in that area is the Robust Automatic Transcription of Speech program, known as RATS, which focuses on “noisy or degraded speech signals that are important to military intelligence.”

Meanwhile, DARPA’s intelligence-world counterpart, IARPA, announced the Babel Program in 2011, with its goal of “developing agile and robust speech recognition technology that can be rapidly applied to any human language in order to provide effective search capability for analysts to efficiently process massive amounts of real-world recorded speech.”

Robert Litt, who as general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is the intelligence community’s chief lawyer, was asked about the NSA’s speech-to-text capabilities at a forum on transparency on Capitol Hill on Friday.

He took the opportunity to lash out at The Intercept’s reporting: “I think that story is a great example of what is wrong with a lot of media coverage of this,” he said. “That story made absolutely no distinction between technical capabilities and legal authorities. There are all sorts of technical capabilities that NSA has. I’m not commenting on the existence or nonexistence of any such authority. The question is when are they used and what are the legal authorities under which they are used. And I think that that’s something that a lot of the press reporting completely ignores, including that story you wrote.”

Asked to explain in what ways the use of speech-to-text is limited, Litt repeatedly refused to even acknowledge its existence.

“I’m not saying that the government isn’t using these techniques. I am not acknowledging that these techniques exist even.”

You won’t hear much about the use of speech recognition for surveillance in academe, either.

US military researchers have presented a new mini-drone, which can be used on civil missions and in war. The toy-sized “Cicada” is capable of picking up enemy submarines, or eavesdropping on troops.

The “Cicada” or Covert Autonomous Disposable Aircraft, is a GPS-guided, micro disposable air vehicle that can glide like bird, as scientists explain, after being dropped from any aircraft, balloons, or even a larger drone.

“The idea was why can’t we make UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) that have the same sort of profile,” Aaron Kahn, a flight controls engineer, from the Naval Research Laboratory told AFP. “We will put so many out there, it will be impossible for the enemy to pick them all up,” he added.

Despite its relatively tiny size, the drone can fly at about 75kph and is fairly silent, as it has no engine or propulsion system.

“It looks like a bird flying down,” said Daniel Edwards, an aerospace engineer at the Naval Research Laboratory, adding the drone is “very difficult to see.”

The prototype cost only $ 1,000 and the price could even be lower – about $250.

The minuscule device survived its test flight back in 2011 near the city of Yuma, Arizona – from 17,500 meters. The drone managed to land within 3 meters of its target.

The device’s inventors say the miniature drone can be used for many types of mission, from weather forecasting or monitoring traffic to eavesdropping on troops.

“They are robotic carrier pigeons. You tell them where to go, and they will go there,” Edwards said.

“You equip these with a microphone or a seismic detector, drop them on that road, and it will tell you ‘I heard a truck or a car travel along that road.’ You know how fast and which direction they’re traveling,” Kahn added.

The tiny vehicles are surprisingly robust, the researchers say.

“They’ve flown through trees. They’ve hit asphalt runways. They have tumbled in gravel. They’ve had sand in them. They only thing that we found that killed them was desert shrubbery,” Edwards said.

According to the scientists, almost every branch of the US government has become interested in the “Cicada”, including some intelligence agencies.

“Everyone is interested. Everyone!” Edwards said.

CICADA: Close-in Covert Autonomous Disposable Aircraft

Nav/Mil

CICADA is a concept for a low-cost, GPS-guided, micro disposable air vehicle that can be deployed in large numbers to “seed” an area with miniature electronic payloads. These payloads could be interconnected to form an ad-hoc, self-configuring network. Communication nodes, sensors, or effectors can then be placed in a programmable geometric pattern in hostile territory without directly over-flying those regions or exposing human agents on the ground.

Essentially a flying circuit board, CICADA has an extremely high packing factor and a very low per-unit cost. Eighteen vehicles can be contained in a six-inch cube. The vehicle is inherently stable in glide, with a glide ratio of 3.5.

Scottish Nationalists Rejoice in Big British Election Win

May 8, 2015

by Katrin Bennhold

New York Times

PAISLEY, Scotland — When the results were in last September and the Scottish National Party lost its bid for Scotland’s independence, a spirited young separatist, Mhairi Black, walked past local officials of the Labour Party who were clapping sarcastically and goading her. “Better luck next time,” they said.

Ms. Black, a 20-year-old politics student, said she briefly considered head-butting them.

Eight months later, she got her revenge. Elected on Thursday as Britain’s youngest member of Parliament in over three centuries, Ms. Black won a once unthinkable victory against Douglas Alexander, one of the most senior Labour politicians, a former cabinet minister and the party’s national campaign strategist.

Her triumph in Paisley, a working-class town — as well as the 27-percentage-point swing in her party’s favor compared with five years ago — was emblematic of the radically changed political map that people in Scotland and Britain woke up to Friday: Scottish nationalists, who held six seats in the last British Parliament, won 56 out of Scotland’s 59 seats. Labour lost 40 of its 41 seats.

Overnight, the Scottish National Party, or S.N.P., ended Labour’s traditional dominance north of the border and emerged as the third-biggest force in Westminster, greatly complicating life for Prime Minister David Cameron as he embarks on a second term.

By Friday morning, Scotland and England looked and felt like different countries, and many wondered whether a breakup of Britain had become inevitable.

Nicola Sturgeon, the popular leader of Scotland’s semiautonomous government and of the S.N.P., has made no secret of her wish for independence. But Ms. Sturgeon, who did not run for a seat in the House of Commons, has also said that even a decisive victory in these elections would not be a mandate for another referendum. Circumstances would have to change, she said.

With Mr. Cameron still in power, they may: He has promised a referendum on Britain’s membership in the European Union. If Britain left the union, a more pro-European Scotland would almost certainly make a case to leave Britain.

For many voters here, another bid for independence after Thursday’s elections is now a question of when, not if.

Fifty percent of Scottish voters backed the S.N.P. in the elections, a bigger share than the 45 percent who voted for independence last fall. But that still leaves the other half of the electorate opposed

“It might take awhile to fall apart, but it’s very difficult to see how the union might be salvaged,” said David Torrance, a Scottish writer and journalist. “In a spiritual sense, it is more or less dead already.”

Many thought that the independence referendum in September would end the debate for a generation. Instead, it electrified politics here. Turnout in Scotland was down from the referendum’s record 84.5 percent but still impressive at 71.1 percent.

“Here is the queer thing, the thrilling thing and the frightening thing,” the columnist Ian Jack wrote in The Guardian recently. “Among the food banks and the trampled front gardens of the big housing schemes, poor people here have begun to feel they have power.”

Back in Paisley, Ms. Black loves football and still has to take her final exams at the University of Glasgow. (“It’s on Scottish politics; I think I have a chance,” she said.) She has spent much of the past two years campaigning for independence.

“There was a lot of regret, even among those who voted no,” she said in an interview before the elections. “As soon as the vote was over, Scotland felt cast aside again.”

Since the referendum, the Scottish National Party has quadrupled its membership, to nearly 110,000. Many of these new supporters used to vote for Labour but say they no longer trust a party perceived to have betrayed its working-class roots.

David Smith, 52, a security guard, is one of those new S.N.P. supporters. Labour, he said, had just become “red Tories,” little different from the Conservatives.

That perception was only reinforced by the image of Ed Miliband, the Labour leader until his resignation on Friday, standing with Mr. Cameron during the last panicked week of the referendum campaign, pressing the Scots not to leave Britain. “They’re all the same,” Mr. Smith scoffed.

These days it is the Scottish National Party, despite its centrist track record in government, that has become most associated with traditional left-wing ideas.

Across Scotland, Labour seats long perceived as safe fell to the S.N.P. The leader of the Scottish Labour Party, Jim Murphy, lost, as did a former deputy leader, Anas Sarwar. Alison Thewliss, who beat Ms. Sarwar, said the results were indicative of “a loss of faith in a Labour Party that has drifted so far from the principles that it once held dear.”

Even Edinburgh, the home of Adam Smith and David Hume, which last year voted 61 percent against independence, elected four S.N.P. lawmakers.

Mr. Alexander, the Labour campaign director who was ousted by Ms. Black in Paisley, had represented the area in Parliament since 1997. Five years ago, he won the seat with 59.6 percent of the vote. As recently as January, his was considered a safe seat.

Then the polls started turning. In recent weeks, the shift became palpable. As one former Labour member of Parliament here told The Economist: “It’s like the last days of Rome. Without sex. Or wine. In fact, with none of the fun bits.”

In U.K. election’s wake, questions on E.U., Scotland

May 8, 2015

by Dan Balz, Griff Witte and Karla Adam

Washington Post

LONDON — Newly empowered British Prime Minister David Cameron moved swiftly to establish the terms and priorities for his new government on Friday after a stunning national election that delivered his Conservative Party an unexpected majority, devastated three other parties and redrew the political map of Scotland.

Following predictions that the post-election maneuvering to form a government might take days if not weeks, the Conservative Party’s big victory produced a quick end to speculation about what or who would be in charge.

But if the election produced an unexpectedly clear outcome, it may only have heightened the degree to which the country faces a period of internal debate, ­inward-looking politics and potential instability, with questions about the durability of the United Kingdom and its place in both Europe and the world still to be answered.

Cameron will have to find a way to manage resurgent Scottish nationalists who are demanding more powers and possibly another referendum on independence. Further, his pledge to hold a referendum to determine Britain’s future in the European Union will continue to raise uncertainty about the country’s commitments and reliability there.

Barely two weeks ago, Cameron was under pressure to step up his performance on the campaign trail. On Friday, he took a ritual trip to Buckingham Palace for an audience with Queen Elizabeth II, who asked him to form a government. Minutes later he was back outside 10 Downing Street promising to bind up a nation that had come under significant strain during a campaign that inflamed the passions of nationalism.

“We must ensure that we bring our country together,” he said. “As I said in the small hours of this morning, we will govern as a party of one nation, one United Kingdom.”

Cameron reiterated his vow to hold a referendum on Britain’s E.U. membership. He also emphasized the carrots in the Conservative Party manifesto — including job-training assistance, additional child-care benefits and home-building programs — but sidestepped mention of the huge welfare cuts needed to bring these to fruition.

Political upheaval

The Conservatives will hold 331 seats in the 650-seat Parliament, while the devastated Labor Party will shrink to just 232.

The Liberal Democrats suffered even greater losses, paying a steep price for having entered into a coalition with the Conservatives after the 2010 election gave no party a majority. From 57 seats in the last Parliament, the Liberal Democrats will enter the new Parliament with just eight members.

The other big winner in Thursday’s voting was the Scottish National Party, led by Nicola Sturgeon. Eight months after losing an independence vote, the SNP captured 56 of the 59 Scottish seats in the national Parliament, destroying the Labor Party in its traditional stronghold. The stunning gains by the SNP not only redrew the politics of Scotland but will add to the challenges Cameron faces in governing a now clearly divided United Kingdom.

The U.K. Independence Party saw its support rise to 13 percent in the national vote, but could claim only one seat because of Britain’s first-past-the-post voting system.

Rather than speculation about who would form the government, Friday brought questions about the future of parties that had been shattered by the strength of the Conservative victory. In rapid succession, the leaders of three parties — Ed Miliband of Labor, Nick Clegg of the Liberal Democrats and Nigel Farage of UKIP — announced that they would resign their positions, an unprecedented series of changes that underscored the wreckage left behind after the voters had spoken.

Labor and the Liberal Democrats face potentially lengthy periods of infighting and introspection as they seek paths back to greater strength and popular appeal. The depths to which both have fallen and the lack of clarity about who will lead them was yet another unexpected outcome in an election filled with surprises.

For all the attention it drew for its anti-immigration views and the pressure it sought to put on Cameron, UKIP ended up with just a single seat. In addition, Farage, the party’s charismatic and controversial leader, lost his bid to win a seat to a Conservative. His resignation as leader fulfilled a pre-election promise, but he did not rule out a comeback. For now, the loss of Farage robs UKIP of its most visible spokesman, leaving open questions of how the party will expand its appeal.

Economic focus

The Conservative victory was a tribute to the campaign run by Cameron and campaign chief Lynton Crosby. The campaign’s message was built around an improving economy, with a strategy designed to put Miliband and the Labor Party on the defensive over the party’s economic reliability and its potential reliance in government on support from the SNP.

Polling showed that respondents believed the economy had improved under the Conservatives, even if they did not believe the benefits had been equitably distributed. Cameron also ran ahead of Miliband on whom voters preferred as prime minister.

The Conservatives ruthlessly went after their coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats, in competitive districts; through targeted messaging, the party also sought to deny Labor seats it hoped to pick up. An energized, passionate and particularly ­negative Cameron campaigned through key target areas in his final push, warning voters not to let Labor back into power.

Miliband won praise for his campaign performance but in the end couldn’t shake doubts about his party and his leadership. One such misgiving was over Labor’s economic management, a fear that the last Labor government had spent too much and would do so again.

More damaging to Miliband and Labor was the rise of the SNP and its impact on voting in both Scotland and England. Sturgeon’s performance in an early televised debate put the issue of the SNP in Parliament into the forefront of the campaign, which Cameron and the Tories quickly exploited to Miliband’s detriment.

“Nationalism squeezed Labor on both ends,” said David Axelrod, long a top adviser to President Obama who was hired to advise the Labor campaign. “The SNP played nationalism in Scotland. The Tories played fears of the SNP skillfully in England.”

The Conservative campaign also drew heavily on the techniques employed by Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign. It used analytics, modeling, targeting and ­social media to reach the voters it needed in the most competitive contests, whether in head-to-head competition with Labor or in districts where three or even four parties were taking votes from one another.

This data work was overseen by Jim Messina, Obama’s 2012 campaign manager, who was recruited by Cameron and Crosby. A week before the election, Messina’s internal projections showed the Tories on track to win 306 seats — far above any public poll at the time — though many races remained extremely close.

On the morning of the election, Messina delivered a document to Crosby projecting that the party would win 312 seats that night. By early that afternoon, based on additional calls, the number was raised to 319.

That ended up tracking almost precisely with the BBC’s projection, based on exit polls, of 316 seats — a prediction that was released as the polls closed and that produced shock waves of surprise.

Daniela Deane contributed to this report.

Sea rise threatens Florida coast, but no statewide plan

May 9, 2015

by Jason Dearen and Jennifer Kay

Associated Press

Florida. — America’s oldest city is slowly drowning.

St. Augustine’s centuries-old Spanish fortress and other national landmarks sit feet from the encroaching Atlantic, whose waters already flood the city’s narrow, brick-paved streets about 10 times a year — a problem worsening as sea levels rise. The city has long relied on tourism, but visitors to the fortress and Ponce de Leon’s mythical Fountain of Youth might someday have to wear waders at high tide.

“If you want to benefit from the fact we’ve been here for 450 years, you have the responsibility to look forward to the next 450,” said Bill Hamilton, a 63-year-old horticulturist whose family has lived in the city since the 1950s. “Is St. Augustine even going to be here? We owe it to the people coming after us to leave the city in good shape.”

St. Augustine is one of many chronically flooded communities along Florida’s 1,200-mile coastline, and officials in these diverse places share a common concern: They’re afraid their buildings and economies will be further inundated by rising seas in just a couple of decades. The effects are a daily reality in much of Florida. Drinking water wells are fouled by seawater. Higher tides and storm surges make for more frequent road flooding from Jacksonville to Key West, and they’re overburdening aging flood-control systems.

But the state has yet to offer a clear plan or coordination to address what local officials across Florida’s coast see as a slow-moving emergency. Republican Gov. Rick Scott is skeptical of man-made climate change and has put aside the task of preparing for sea level rise, an Associated Press review of thousands of emails and documents pertaining to the state’s preparations for rising seas found.

Despite warnings from water experts and climate scientists about risks to cities and drinking water, skepticism over sea level projections and climate change science has hampered planning efforts at all levels of government, the records showed. Florida’s environmental agencies under Scott have been downsized and retooled, making them less effective at coordinating sea level rise planning in the state, the documents showed.

“If I were governor, I’d be out there talking about it (sea level rise) every day,” said Eric Buermann, the former general counsel to the Republican Party of Florida who also served as a water district governing board member. “I think he’s really got to grab ahold of this, set a vision, a long-term vision, and rally the people behind it. Unless you’re going to build a sea wall around South Florida, what’s the plan?”

The issue presents a public works challenge that could cost billions here and nationwide. In the third-most populous U.S. state, where most residents live near a coast, municipalities say they need statewide coordination and aid to prepare for the costly road ahead.

Communities like St. Augustine can do only so much alone. If one city builds a seawall, it might divert water to a neighbor. Cities also lack the technology, money and manpower to keep back the seas by themselves.

In a brief interview with the AP in March, Scott wouldn’t address whether the state had a long-range plan. He cited his support for Everglades restoration and some flood-control projects as progress but said cities and counties should contact environmental and water agencies to find answers — though Scott and a GOP-led legislature have slashed billions in funding from those agencies. Spokespeople for the water districts and other agencies disputed that cuts have affected their abilities to plan.

“We will continue to make investments and find solutions to protect our environment and preserve Florida’s natural beauty for our future generations,” the governor said in a statement.

Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection is in charge of protecting the state environment and water but has taken no official position on sea level rise, according to documents. DEP spokeswoman Lauren Engel said the agency’s strategy is to aid local communities and others through the state’s routine beach-nourishment and water-monitoring programs.

In St. Augustine, downtown streets around 19th century buildings built by oil tycoon Henry Flagler often close during nor’easters because of flooding. While the city’s proximity to the sea has always made flooding a problem, residents say it’s worsened over the past 15 to 20 years.

St. Augustine’s civil engineer says that the low-lying village will probably need a New Orleans-style pumping system to keep water out — but that but no one knows exactly what to do and the state’s been unhelpful.

“Only when the frequency of flooding increases will people get nervous about it, and by then it will be too late,” engineer Reuben Franklin said. “There’s no guidance from the state or federal level. … Everything I’ve found to help I’ve gotten by searching the Internet.”

Across coastal Florida, sea levels are rising faster than previously measured, according to federal estimates. In addition to more flooding at high tide, increasing sea levels also mean higher surges during tropical storms and hurricanes, and more inundation of drinking wells throughout Florida.

Water quality is a big concern for many communities. It’s especially bad in South Florida — just north of Miami, Hallandale Beach has abandoned six of eight drinking water wells because of saltwater intrusion. Wells in northeast and central Florida are deemed at risk too.

While South Florida water officials have led the charge in addressing sea level rise concerns in their area, their attempt to organize a statewide plan was met with indifference, documents show. The Scott administration has organized just a few conference calls to coordinate local efforts, records show. Those came only after Florida’s water district managers asked DEP for help.

In a recent visit to Everglades National Park, President Barack Obama said the wetlands, vital to Florida’s tourism economy and drinking-water supply, already are threatened by infusions of saltwater from rising seas.

The list of other problems across the state is growing. Miami Beach is spending $400 million on new stormwater pumps to keep seawater from overwhelming an outdated sewer system.

In St. Augustine, homes built on sand dunes teeter over open space as erosion eats at the foundations. Beachside hotel owners worry about their livelihoods.

Tampa and Miami are particularly vulnerable to rising seas — many roads and bridges weren’t designed to handle higher tides, according to the National Climate Change Assessment. Officials say Daytona Beach roads, too, flood more often than in the 1990s.

South Miami passed a resolution calling for South Florida to secede from the more conservative northern half of the state so it could deal with climate change itself.

Insurance giant Swiss Re has estimated that the economy in southeast Florida could sustain $33 billion in damage from rising seas and other climate-related damage in 2030, according to the Miami-Dade Sea Level Rise Task Force.

Cities like St. Augustine have looked for help, but Scott’s disregard for climate change science has created a culture of fear among state employees, records show.

The administration has been adamant that employees, including scientists, not “assign cause” in public statements about global warming or sea level rise, internal government emails show.

For example, an April 28, 2014, email approving a DEP scientist’s request to participate in a National Geographic story came with a warning: “Approved. Make no claims as to cause … stay with the research you are doing, of course,” the DEP manager, Pamela Phillips, warned.

“I know the drill,” responded Mike Shirley, manager of the Guana Tolomato Matanzas National Estuarine Research Reserve near St. Augustine.

Agency spokeswoman Engel said Phillips was a lower-level staffer whose views didn’t necessarily reflect the entire administration. When asked whether staffers are told not to assign cause, Scott’s office said “the allegations are not true”.

Most towns say they cannot afford the cost of climate change studies or regional coordination.

“For us, it’s a reality, it’s not a political issue,” said Courtney Barker, city manager of Satellite Beach. The town near Cape Canaveral used to flood during tropical weather, but now just a heavy rainstorm can make roads impassable for commuters.

“When you have to listen to that mantra, ‘Climate change, is it real or not?’ you kind of chuckle, because you see it,” Barker said.

Scott administration officials are moving forward on a five-year plan that will provide basic guidance to cities dealing with sea level rise. Scott has appointed the Department of Economic Opportunity as the lead agency overseeing the project.

The DEO has received nearly $1 million in federal grants for the plan. More than half has been spent on staff time and travel or hasn’t yet been allocated, according to documents. The rest, about $450,000, went to contract researchers who are helping create the document, due in 2016. Agency spokeswoman Jessica Sims wouldn’t comment and refused requests for the program’s manager to be interviewed.

In one grant-funded study, Florida State University researchers asked local leaders about sea rise. Some officials complained to researchers about the “poisonous political atmosphere” over climate change hampering progress. The AP obtained the report in a public records request.

“In some cases, especially at the local level, planners are constrained by perceptions among elected officials that there is a lack of reliable scientific information to support the existence of sea level rise,” report authors summarized.

Scott’s office again said “the allegations are not true” when asked about the political atmosphere in government agencies.

As for concerns over drinking water, water district officials said they were happy with the state’s funding. But internal emails show frustration among those working behind the scenes to better organize a statewide sea level rise planning group.

“I often worry about the next generations; I think they will survive in spite of us,” Dave DeWitt, a staffer at the Southwest Florida Water Management District, said in an email to colleagues. A district spokeswoman wouldn’t comment on policy beyond the district.

St. Augustine officials say they need state-level coordination, or in coming decades much of historic downtown could be ankle-deep in water at high tide.

Franklin, the engineer, said, “Are we going to be early to the game in terms of planning for this, or late?”

Is sea level rising?

Sea level is rising at an increasing rate.

May 1, 2015

noaa.gov

There is strong evidence that global sea level is now rising at an increased rate and will continue to rise during this century.

While studies show that sea levels changed little from AD 0 until 1900, sea levels began to climb in the 20th century.

The two major causes of global sea-level rise are thermal expansion caused by the warming of the oceans (since water expands as it warms) and the loss of land-based ice (such as glaciers and polar ice caps) due to increased melting.

Records and research show that sea level has been steadily rising at a rate of 0.04 to 0.1 inches per year since 1900.

This rate may be increasing. Since 1992, new methods of satellite altimetry (the measurement of elevation or altitude) indicate a rate of rise of 0.12 inches per year.

This is a significantly larger rate than the sea-level rise averaged over the last several thousand years.

Melt of Key Antarctic Glaciers ‘Unstoppable,’ Studies Find

by Andrea Thompson

Climate Central

One of the biggest question marks surrounding the fate of the planet’s coastlines is dangling from its underbelly.

The melting of the Antarctic ice sheet has long been a relatively minor factor in the steady ascent of high-water marks, responsible for about an eighth of the 3 millimeters of annual sea-level rise. But when it comes to climate change, Antarctica is the elephantine ice sculpture in the boiler room. The ice sheet is so massive that its decline is, according to the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment, “the largest potential source” of future sea level rise. Accurately forecasting how much of it will be unleashed as seawater, and when that will happen, could help coastal communities plan for surging flood risks.

A study published Aug. 14 in Earth System Dynamics — one that took more than 2 years and 50,000 computer simulations to complete, combining information from 26 atmospheric, oceanic, and ice sheet models from four polar regions — has helped scientists hone their forecasts for this century’s Antarctic thaw. And the results of the global research effort were more sobering than the findings of most of the more limited studies that came before it.

The world’s seas could rise anywhere from less than half an inch up to more than a foot by the end of this century solely because of the effects of balmier waters fanning Antarctica’s underside, causing ice to melt, icebergs to calve, and ice and snowpack to slough into the sea, the scientists calculated. The upper limit of that projection is more than double earlier estimates, with scientists attributing the change to advances in models.

“The largest uncertainty that we have with regards to Antarctica is, how much of the warming reaches the continent through the ocean, and how much melting does it cause?” said Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research’s Anders Levermann, who led the study. Levermann was also a lead author of the sea level rise chapter in the most recent IPCC assessment.

Those figures do not include additional sea level rise caused by melting glaciers, by the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, by the expansion of warming water, or from the effects of groundwater pumping, which shifts water from aquifers to the seas. If the most recent IPCC projections for those sources of rising seas were combined with the new Antarctic figures, the U.N. group’s upper limit for overall sea level rise by century’s end would increase to 119 cm, or nearly 4 feet. That’s up by more than a fifth compared with the figure included in last year’s assessment.

That’s a lot of water. For comparison, seas have risen about 8 inches since the turn of the 20th Century, as temperatures have risen by 1.5°F, due primarily to the burning of fossil fuels. That has increased rates of flooding across coastal U.S. and driven some Pacific Islanders to seek asylum in foreign lands. The hastening pace of sea level rise threatens to reshape the lives of more than a billion coastal dwellers and imperils potentially tens of trillions of dollars worth of infrastructure.

Of course, upper limits are just that — they represent the highest levels of sea-level rise for which science currently says coastal planning departments should brace. “It’s this upper limit that’s important for coastal planners,” said Levermann.

But rising upper limits come with rising median projections, which, by definition, have a 50 percent likelihood of being surpassed. Median projections produced through the new study suggest a rise of several inches is likely due to Antarctic melt alone.

The vast range of lower and upper limits for sea level rise caused by Antarctic ice-sheet melting that were included in the new paper — more than a foot — were partly the result of uncertainty over how much greenhouse gas pollution the world will churn out during the coming decades. The upper limit assumes that annual greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase. But it also reflects the vast uncertainty in ice sheet and other models that were combined to simulate Antarctic melting.

“A reason for our higher SLR [sea level rise], and for the range in SLR, is that the present study also includes the uncertainty in the climate and ocean forcing driving the ice sheet models of Antarctica,” said Sophie Nowicki, a NASA Goddard scientist who coauthored the new paper. “In other words, more potential climatic futures are considered.”

The melting of the other great ice sheet, which blankets Greenland, is driven largely by rising air temperatures. Those processes can be difficult to understand. But the processes that melt the Antarctic ice sheet are even more convoluted. Antarctica is further from the equator than is Greenland, which keeps the air frigid even in summer, shielding most surface ice from melting. Unlike in Greenland, much of the Antarctic ice sheet is submerged below sea level, causing it to melt from beneath and crumple into the sea as oceans absorb heat that’s accumulating the atmosphere.

Antarctica’s ice sheet is more than a mile deep on average, holding enough water to raise sea levels 200 feet should it all melt. That means the southern ice sheet has more potential to flood the world than does its boreal counterpart — although the Antarctic melt is taking longer to kick into gear.

The melting of the two ice sheets was responsible for a third of sea level rise from 2002 to 2011, according to numbers in the recent IPCC report. The Antarctic ice-sheet melt caused about 40 percent of that; Greenland’s ice-sheet caused 60 percent. The melting of the ice sheets are playing growing roles in coastal floods.

It seems that the more we learn about the forces that cause ice sheets to melt, the more vulnerable we realize they are to wither. The IPCC cited “improved modeling” when it raised its forecasts for sea level rise in its recent report, compared with the projections it published in 2007.

Natalya Gomez, a post-doctoral fellow at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Science at New York University who researches ice sheet and sea level interactions, says the numbers published in the new paper are “not the final answer.” Gomez says they will continue to be refined in the coming years as ice-sheet models and other models continue to improve. She warns that the sea level rise projections could increase even further as models evolve.

The beauty of the new work, says Gomez, who was not involved in the research, lies in the fact that the scientists behind it have developed a tool that will propel a nascent and challenging field.

Human Rights Watch has issued a report stating that mentally ill prisoners are being abused in detention facilities across the US, and that these practices are happening in over 5,000 facilities.

The activist group says inmates are being subjected to unnecessary and excessive use of force, and the problem is widespread.

The report provides details of cases where inmates were shocked with Tasers, and where pepper spray was used against them.

In some cases, prisoners were left in restraint chairs for days, or put in scalding showers.

“I think the public and legislators for far too long have been willing to send people to prison, without thinking a whole lot about what life behind bars [is like]. And what goes on behind bars is often hidden, people don’t know what is happening,” Jamie Fellner, one of the report’s authors and senior adviser at Human Rights Watch, told RT.

She added that prison authorities “don’t issue monthly reports on how many people they have pepper-sprayed, or how many people have had Tasers used against them.”

“What we wanted to focus on was <…> the fact that in so many cases when force wasn’t required, when you had non-violent, minor non-threatening misconduct by a prisoner that didn’t need to be responded to with force,” Fellner concluded.

Among the especially troubling cases was Nick Christie, a 62-year-old man who had recently stopped taking his medications for depression and anxiety. He was incarcerated in Florida in 2009 for a nonviolent misdemeanor.

At one point, locked in his cell and crying out for medical help, he kept yelling and banging on the cell door.

Prison officials sprayed him with chemical spray over a dozen times in 36 hours, and immobilized him in a restraint chair with a spit mask covering his face. He died from cardiac arrest.

Another Florida prisoner diagnosed with schizophrenia defecated on the floor of his cell and refused to clean it up.

Officers allegedly put him in a scalding shower, left him there for over an hour, and the inmate subsequently died.

However, the case that specifically caught the attention of human rights activists was 35-year-old Christopher Lopez. He was diagnosed as schizophrenic and was discovered on his cell floor semi-conscious.

Staff failed to call medics and instead put Lopez in a restraint chair. A few hours later, he experienced a severe seizure.

The officers finally released him from the chair, but left him lying handcuffed on the floor. Lopez died a few hours later. His lawyer spoke to RT about the case.

“His mother had contacted me and said he had died in custody, she went to look at the body and saw signs of abuse. That got me interested, I got hold of the autopsy report, and began to investigate it,” attorney David Lane said.

“What appeared to be the cause of death was an overdose of psychotropic medication to the point of electrolyte imbalance, and his heart was slowly stopping,” he added.

The lawyer also told RT that the general attitude towards mentally ill inmates in the US is that they are a “management problem,” and they are dealt with like this, “as opposed to mentally ill human beings.”

Around 20 percent of prisoners in the US have a serious mental illness, including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depression, according to a press release issued by Human Rights Watch. Inmates suffering from such conditions often find it difficult to cope with imprisonment and to comply with instructions.

MH370 search discovers shipwreck

Australian-led team scouring the southern Indian Ocean finds anchor and debris from uncharted wreck at depth of nearly 4,000 metres

May 13, 2015

Agence France-Presse

The hunt for missing the Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 has uncovered a previously uncharted shipwreck, leading officials to say on Wednesday that if the plane is in their search zone they will find it.

The Australian-led team is scouring the southern Indian Ocean seabed in hope of finding the final resting place of MH370, which vanished on 8 March 2014 en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

No wreckage from the flight, which was carrying 239 people, has been found.

In an update on the search, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau said it had spotted “multiple small bright reflections” on the otherwise featureless seabed which warranted close inspection.

Data from a high-resolution sonar scan using an autonomous underwater vehicle revealed possible items, mostly only about the size of a cricket ball, some 3,900 metres (12,795 feet) underwater.

While the debris field appeared to be of human-made origin, it failed to have all the characteristics of a typical aircraft debris field so authorities sent down an underwater camera which discovered the shipwreck.

“It’s a fascinating find,” said Peter Foley, director of the operational search for MH370. “But it’s not what were looking for.”

Images clearly showed an anchor, along with other objects the searchers said were human-made.

Foley said officials were not pausing in the search for MH370, whose disappearance is one of aviation’s great mysteries. “Obviously, we’re disappointed that it wasn’t the aircraft, but we were always realistic about the likelihood,” he added.

“And this event has really demonstrated that the systems, people and the equipment involved in the search are working well. It’s shown that if there’s a debris field in the search area, we’ll find it.”

The search for the aircraft has been a complex undertaking, with Australia concentrating on a remote area of the southern Indian Ocean far off its west coast spanning 60,000 square kilometres (23,166 square miles).

Many of the NSA’s Loudest Defenders Have Financial Ties to NSA Contractors

May 13, 2015

by Lee Fang

The Intercept

The debate over the NSA’s bulk collection of phone records has reached a critical point after a federal appeals court last week ruled the practice illegal, dramatically raising the stakes for pending Congressional legislation that would fully or partially reinstate the program. An army of pundits promptly took to television screens, with many of them brushing off concerns about the surveillance.

The talking heads have been backstopping the NSA’s mass surveillance more or less continuously since it was revealed. They spoke out to support the agency when NSA contractor Edward Snowden released details of its programs in 2013, and they’ve kept up their advocacy ever since — on television news shows, newspaper op-ed pages, online and at Congressional hearings. But it’s often unclear just how financially cozy these pundits are with the surveillance state they defend, since they’re typically identified with titles that give no clues about their conflicts of interest. Such conflicts have become particularly important, and worth pointing out, now that the debate about NSA surveillance has shifted from simple outrage to politically prominent legislative debates.

As one example of the opaque link between NSA money and punditry, take the words of Stewart Baker, who was general counsel to the NSA from 1992 through 1994. During a Senate committee hearing last summer on one of the reform bills now before Congress, the USA FREEDOM Act, which would partially limit mass surveillance of telephone metadata, Baker essentially said the bill would aid terrorists.

“First, I do not believe we should end the bulk collection program,” he told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. “It will put us at risk. It will, as Senator King strongly suggested, slow our responses to serious terrorist incidents. And it is a leap into the dark with respect to this data.”

Previously, in December 2013, Baker wrote in The New York Times that “Snowden has already lost the broader debate he claims to want, and the leaks are slowly losing their international impact as well.” He made similar comments in multiple news outlets, and testified before Congress to defend virtually every program revealed by the Snowden documents. Baker at one point told intelligence committee lawmakers that The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald was simply on a campaign to “cause the greatest possible diplomatic damage to the United States and its intelligence capabilities.”

Baker has identified himself at various points as a former government official with the NSA and Department of Homeland Security and as a Washington, D.C. attorney. But the law firm at which Baker is a partner, Steptoe & Johnson, maintains a distinct role in the world of NSA contracting. At the time of his pro-NSA advocacy in 2013 and 2014, the company was registered to lobby on behalf of companies which have served as major NSA contractors, including Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), Leidos and Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC).

Asked about his law firm’s lobby work for NSA contractors, Baker responded, “If you’re looking for someone with a ‘financial stake in the surveillance debate’ you should start with your boss, Glenn Greenwald, who has a $250 million stake in continuing to present the debate as ‘Snowden good. NSA evil.’ And, of course, there’s you. You’ve got a ‘financial stake’ in keeping your job. Which means that you won’t have the balls to publish my reply.” (Pierre Omidyar made a $50 million contribution and $250 million commitment to First Look Media. Glenn Greenwald is the co-founding editor of the First Look publication The Intercept, not the holder of a $250 million stake.)

Due to the secretive nature of the agency’s work, NSA contracts are often shielded from public disclosure, and identifying financial links between pundits and the agency’s web of partners is tricky. But the work of journalists and whistleblowers such as James Bamford, who was assigned to an NSA unit while serving in the Navy, gives us a sense of which companies work for U.S. intelligence agencies. Drawing largely from these disclosures, The Intercept has identified several former government and military officials whose voices have shaped the public discourse around government spying and surveillance issues but whose financial ties to NSA contractors have received little attention. These pundits have played a key role in the public debate as the White House and the agency itself have struggled to defend the most controversial spying programs revealed by Snowden’s documents.

Fox News Military Analyst Jack Keane appears regularly on the network to opine on national security issues. His credentials are strong. Keane served as a four star general, as vice chief of staff of the Army, and is currently the chairman of the Institute for the Study of War.

Keane has appeared on Fox News to discuss surveillance issues multiple times, coming down squarely in support of the NSA. Last year, as President Obama was developing reform proposals mirroring key provisions in the FREEDOM Act, including limits on the collection of phone records, he dismissed concerns about civil liberties.

“Well, I believe what the NSA has been doing has been right on the mark,” Keane told Fox Business Network’s Lou Dobbs. Backing down from any of the NSA programs, Keane said, would make America “less secure and more vulnerable.” In another appearance on Fox, Keane called the bulk collection of American phone records “vital for national security.”

Since 2004, Keane has served as board member to General Dynamics, a firm that contracts with the NSA — as occasionally disclosed publicly, as in October 2014, in 2010, and in 2009. For his service as a board member, Keane has earned about a quarter of a million dollars a year in cash and stock awards. According to a December 2010 Boston Globe article, Keane has also worked as a consultant to other military contractors, pushing government officials to hire his clients for government work, but failed to register his activities under the Lobbying Disclosure Act because he said his lobby activity fell below the statutory requirement for registration.

A spokesman for Keane said he “appears on TV news as much as 30 times per month, covering multiple topics at each appearance as a military analyst. He does not recall making comments on the topic you have mentioned.”

In June of 2013, following the first Snowden disclosures, retired General Wesley Clark and former Central Intelligence Agency Chief James Woolsey cast aspersions on the whistleblower who brought the NSA’s privacy violations to light.

“The American people,” Clark said confidently during an interview on CNN, “are solidly behind the PRISM program and all that’s going on.” Appearing on Fox News, Woolsey referred to Snowden’s disclosure of documents as “damaging because it gives terrorists an idea of how we collect and what we might know.” Woolsey would later comment that Snowden “should be hanged by his neck” if convicted for treason.

The men are, and were at the time, advisors to Paladin Capital Group, an investment advisor and private equity firm whose Homeland Security Fund was set up about three months after the September 11 attacks to focus on defense and intelligence-related startups. Woolsey confirmed he is paid by Paladin Capital; Clark did not respond to a request for comment. In 2014, Paladin’s portfolio was valued at more than $587 million. At the time of Woolsey and Clark’s anti-Snowden statements, it included a stake in Endgame Systems, a computer network security company that had worked with the NSA, having reportedly counted the agency among its largest customers. Paladin was also invested in CyberCore, which had provided technological work to the NSA. Later, in 2014, Paladin invested in Shadow Networks, formerly known as ZanttzZ, which also provided tech work to the NSA.

In March 2014, former Republican National Committee Chair Jim Gilmore took to the pages of the Washington Times to write that, “Mr. Snowden’s traitorous act is a perfect example of the dual threat we face from state and non-state actors.” He also promoted his view that conservatives should not embrace Snowden’s disclosures about mass surveillance during a testy debate with libertarians at the Conservative Political Action Conference last year.

At CPAC, Gilmore touted his credentials on the issue of homeland security as “the governor of Virginia during the 9/11 attack” and chairman of an advisory board on homeland security issues. But since 2009, Gilmore has also worked for a major NSA contractor as member of the board of CACI International, for which he has been compensated with more than $1 million in cash and stock awards. CACI, the firm whose contractors were behind the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, has steadily increased its stake in the cyberintelligence business, acquiring the firm Six3 Systems, an NSA contractor, for $820 million two years ago.

In an email to The Intercept, Gilmore acknowledged his relationship with CACI and noted that he served on advisory committee for Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), an NSA contractor. “I cannot confirm whether any [of] these companies contracted with NSA,” he wrote. “I do not feel I have a conflict of interest that would prevent me from commenting on public policy issues related to national security. Also, I have been very vocal in the past as to warning against the loss of civil freedoms due to reaction to the dangers we face in today’s world.”

Establishment think tanks, such as the Center for Strategic and International Studies, have also influenced the debate around NSA surveillance. CSIS put out a report defending surveillance programs along with a statement of principles calling for policymakers to recognize and maintain the “irreplaceable role” of American intelligence.

The surveillance report was released last May by a group of former government officials, including CSIS president John Hamre. The year the report came out, Hamre received close to a quarter of a million dollars as a board member to NSA contractor Leidos, as he had the year prior. In 2013 and again in 2012, Hamre took close to quarter of a million dollars as a board member at SAIC, which has served as a major NSA contractor and which split to form Leidos. (Hamre did not respond to a request for comment.) Also responsible for the report was former NSA director Mike McConnell — only identified by “Former Director of National Intelligence” rather than as vice chairman of NSA contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, his role at the time. (McConnell “was not representing Booz Allen in his participation” in the report, a Booz Allen spokesperson said, responding to a request to McConnell for comment.)

“If journalists are writing about this they should not be naive about the immensity of the security establishment,” said Columbia Journalism School professor Todd Gitlin.

Gitlin says that he understands why media outlets would call upon former government officials to discuss NSA issues given that they have “earned their expertise by virtue of their institutional experience.” But, he adds, the onus for disclosure ultimately lies with reporters and news programs, who should be asking these experts to reveal potential conflicts of interest and to explain the basis of their assertions about national security.

“The security industrial complex, in which the revolving door is a fixture,” Gitlin remarks, “requires a high degree of caution on the part of journalists and a high degree of scrutiny.”

To critics of mass surveillance, the role of these pundits tied to the NSA contracting industry exposes deeper problems.

“The media is happy to let these people defend the surveillance state on air but less interested in reporting on how it butters their bread,” said Kevin Connor, the director of the Public Accountability Initiative, a think tank that studies political elites.

After Connor released a well-publicized report on television pundits with ties to defense contractors who stood to benefit from U.S.-led missile strikes in Syria, many of those pundits remained on the airwaves, continuing to advocate intervention without disclosing how their companies would benefit from such policies. “If you are an insider, you are a trusted expert, even if you happen to have a financial stake in the debate,” Connor continued, adding, “it also serves as a useful reminder of the myriad ways in which corporate America is implicated in the surveillance apparatus, profiting from it, and protected by it.”

For the NSA’s private sector partners, the Snowden disclosures not only invited unwelcome scrutiny of the surveillance industry, but also fears that Congress might cut back on intelligence spending.

Speaking with investors following the Snowden leaks, Bill Varner, an executive with ManTech International, which has contracted with the NSA, raised the possibility of losing business. “It is too soon to tell if there will be any fallout in terms of reduced mission scope for the intelligence community or for contractor support to that community,” he said. Speaking on an earnings call shortly after the first revelations, a financial analyst also worried that “negative media attention from Mr. Snowden” could impair future intelligence business for Booz Allen Hamilton, the contractor that briefly employed Snowden. Booz Allen’s stock dropped nearly 5 percent following the news of his leaks. But within weeks, the company’s shares rebounded.

Alleen Brown and Sheelagh McNeill contributed research to this report.

5 reasons Chicago is in worse shape than Detroit

May 13, 2015

Tim Jones

Bloomberg

Forget all the nicknames attached to Chicago for generations — Windy City, City of Big Shoulders, the City that Works. This gleaming metropolis of 2.7 million people is now, along with Detroit, junk city.

When Moody’s Investors Service downgraded Chicago’s debt on Tuesday to junk status, it deepened the city’s financial crisis and elevated comparisons to the industrial ruin 280 miles to the east.

Chicago partisans, starting with Mayor Rahm Emanuel, argue vehemently that their city isn’t Detroit. They cite population growth, a diverse economy bolstered by an abundance of Fortune 500 companies, vibrant neighborhoods and a booming tourist trade.

Here are five reasons that, now more than ever, suggest Chicago is akin to Detroit — or, by some measures, even worse. Or, as Illinois Republican Governor Bruce Rauner put it last month: “Chicago is in deep, deep yogurt.”

1. BIG, SCARY NUMBERS

Chicago’s unfunded liability from four pension funds is $20 billion and growing, hitting every city resident with an obligation of about $7,400.

Detroit, whose population of about 689,000 is roughly a quarter of Chicago’s, had a retirement funding gap of $3.5 billion, meaning each resident was liable for $5,100. A January 2014 report from Morningstar Municipal Credit Research showed that among the 25 largest cities and Puerto Rico, Chicago had the highest per- capita pension liability.

2. HOSTILE COURT

When Detroit filed for Chapter 9 in July 2013, a federal bankruptcy judge exerted his considerable powers and decreed that everyone — taxpayers, employees, bondholders and creditors alike — would get a haircut to settle the crisis. When the Illinois Supreme Court ruled on May 8, it said the state couldn’t cut pension benefits as part of a solution to restructure the state retirement system.

That decision sent a clear signal to Chicago, which was trying to follow the state’s benefit-cutting lead. Where the Detroit judge acted, the Illinois justices told elected officials to clean up the mess of their own making.

3. POLITICAL PARALYSIS

Just as Detroit slid into bankruptcy after decades of economic and actuarial warnings, Chicago politicians have watched the train wreck rumble toward them for more than a decade. During that time, they skipped pension payments and paid scant attention to the financial damage being done. In 10 years starting in 2002, the city increased its bonded debt by 84 percent, according to the Civic Federation, which tracks city finances. That added more than $1,300 to the tab of every Chicago resident.

In Michigan, Governor Rick Snyder acted when the crisis in Detroit couldn’t be avoided. He invoked a state law giving an emergency manager what amounts to fiscal martial-law power. In Chicago’s case, there’s no political pressure to invoke a similar law. And a proposal supported by Rauner that would allow municipalities to seek bankruptcy protection without state approval is languishing in the Illinois legislature

4. NO BAILOUT

Detroit’s bankruptcy filing allowed it to restructure its debt, officially snuffing out $7 billion of it by cutting pensions and payments to creditors.

In Illinois, the nation’s lowest-rated state with unfunded pension obligations of $111 billion, Rauner had a blunt message last week in an unprecedented address to Chicago’s City Council: The city will get no state bailout.

5. DENIAL

After years of denial, Detroit officials finally, if grudgingly, agreed to major surgery. At least for now, Chicago’s Emanuel is sticking to his view that the Illinois Supreme Court’s rejection of a state pension reform law doesn’t apply to the city. “That reform is not affected by today’s ruling, as we believe our plan fully complies with the State constitution because it fundamentally preserves and protects worker pensions,” he said in a statement on Friday.

Four days later, Moody’s begged to differ. “In our opinion,” it wrote, “the Illinois Supreme Court’s May 8 ruling raises the risk that the statute governing Chicago’s Municipal and Laborer pension plans will eventually be overturned.”

The Shroud of Turin Commentary

The Shroud of Turin is a 14th-century forgery and is one of many such deliberately created Jesus related relics produced in the same period, all designed to attract pilgrims to specific shrines to enhance and increase the status and financial income of the local church.

There were countless crucifixion nails, crowns of thorns, and lances. And there were burial shrouds.

There were between 26 and 40 ‘authentic’ burial shrouds scattered throughout the abbeys of Europe, of which the Shroud of Turin is just one.

In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, fragments supposedly cut from the True Cross were available in almost every church in Europe.

A church in St. Omer claimed to have bits of the True Cross, of the Lance that pierced Christ, of his Cradle, and the original stone tablets upon which the Ten Commandments had been traced by the very finger of God!

Three churches in France each professed to have a complete corpse of Mary Magdalene.

Jesus’ foreskin was preserved in at least six churches.

Vials of Jesus’ tears, vials of Jesus’ mother’s milk.

One catalogue from that time includes the following: “A fragment of St. Stephen’s rib; Rusted remains of the gridiron on which St. Lawrence died; A Lock of Mary’s hair; A small piece of her robe; A piece of the Manger; Part of one of Our Lord’s Sandals; A piece of the sponge that had been filled with vinegar and handed up to Him; A fragment of bread He had shared with His disciples; A tuft of St. Peter’s beard; Drops of St. John the Baptist’s Blood.”

Many churches vied to become known for the number and importance of their relics.

As early as 1071 the cathedral at Eichstatt possessed 683 relics, while by the 1520s the Schlosskirche at Wittenburg had 19,013 and the Schlosskirche at Halle boasted more than 21,000 such objects.

About 1200, Constantinople was so crammed with relics that one may speak of a veritable industry with its own factories”.

Blinzler (a Catholic New Testament scholar) lists, as examples: “letters in Jesus’ own hand, the gold brought to the baby Jesus by the wise men, the twelve baskets of bread collected after the miraculous feeding of the 5000, the throne of David, the trumpets of Jericho, the axe with which Noah made the Ark, and so on…”

During the Middle Ages particularly, relic-mongering was rampant; and of course, there were no scientific means to test things, so all manner of things were sold as authentic.

Including shrouds of Jesus.

]]>0adminhttp://www.tbrnews.org/?p=9882015-05-08T17:00:29Z2015-05-08T17:00:29ZThe Voice of the White House

Washington, D.C. May 7, 2015: “Spring is upon us and the warming weather is bringing all kinds of creeps out from under damp logs. These are the usual gross types that long to sit in the Oval Office and are sharpening their claws for the forthcoming elections. Looking over the growing slate of candidates, I have to say I wouldn’t let a single one of them into my house. Nothing of value would be safe and they would leave nasty stains on the furniture. Unfortunately, America has drifted into corruption and incompetence to a degree that would shock even the throughly corrupt and useless Mexican government. Fortunately, rampant Jesus Freaks are not in the running this time but other odd ones are making more noise than a donkey into whose fundament some evil person has just shoved a very hot sweet potato. It doesn’t really matter who sits in the Presidential training potty because the country is run, as it has been for years, by a conglomerate of greedy and throughly vile bankers and heads of large corporations.”

Record number of Americans living abroad renounce citizenship

May 7, 2015

RT

A record number of Americans gave up their US citizenship in the first quarter of 2015, according to IRS data. This is blamed on the taxation of income earned outside the US, along with laws expanding offshore bank account and asset reporting.

A total of 1,335 people renounced US citizenship during the first three months of the year, topping the previous record by 18 percent, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

The new figure puts 2015 on track to exceed last year’s 3,415 renunciations, which is an all-time record.

The data released by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) includes the names of those who renounced their citizenship, but not their reasons for doing so. However, it comes as the US government is becoming more aggressive when it comes to the assets of the estimated 6 million Americans who live abroad.

The United States is the only country within the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that taxes citizens wherever they reside.

American citizens who live abroad can exclude as much as $100,800 in earned income and can receive tax credits for payments to foreign governments. However, US tax liabilities can apply to children born to Americans abroad. In many cases, there are only partial offsets available for double taxation.

The paperwork involved for US citizens living abroad can be so complex that it requires professional help from accountants and lawyers – resulting in incredibly high fees for a relatively simple tax return.

Although these laws were rarely enforced in the past, scrutiny of US citizens abroad has intensified due to the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), passed by Congress in 2010.

The law, which took effect in July, requires US citizens with foreign assets in excess of $50,000 to report those assets every year. It also requires foreign financial institutions to report the incomes of their US customers to the IRS.

FATCA also requires US financial institutions to impose a 30 percent withholding tax on payments made to foreign banks which don’t agree to identify and provide information on US account holders.

More than 140,000 banks and other firms have signed up to comply with FATCA. However, the law has prompted some banks to decline doing business with people who have ties to the US. If a bank mistakenly fails to report accounts held by US citizens, they can face steep penalties.

The Obama administration has praised the law as the “global standard” in battling tax evasion, though it has come under fierce criticism from many, particularly from Americans living abroad.

Washington’s tax policies for those living abroad have also put two high-profile personalities in the spotlight.

Eduardo Saverin, a Brazilian-born co-founder of Facebook, gave up his US citizenship in 2012. The billionaire moved to Singapore, where top earners are taxed only 20 percent on their earnings, and where capital gains taxes are not be imposed.

At the time, it was estimated that Saverin’s move would save him $67 million in US federal taxes. However, it was never officially confirmed that his citizenship renunciation was for tax purposes.

Meanwhile, London Mayor Boris Johnson – who was born in New York – said earlier this year that he would give up his US citizenship. The statement followed his settlement of a US tax bill which he described as “absolutely outrageous.” However, his name was not on the list released Friday.

Criminal Cases Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Treaties: Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Treaties (MLATs) are relatively recent development. They seek to improve the effectiveness of judicial assistance and to regularize and facilitate its procedures. Each country designates a central authority, generally the two Justice Departments, for direct communication. The treaties include the power to summon witnesses, to compel the production of documents and other real evidence, to issue search warrants, and to serve process. Generally, the remedies offered by the treaties are only available to the prosecutors. The defense must usually proceed with the methods of obtaining evidence in criminal matters under the laws of the host country which usually involve letters rogatory.

Most people realize that emails and other digital communications they once considered private can now become part of their permanent record.

But even as they increasingly use apps that understand what they say, most people don’t realize that the words they speak are not so private anymore, either.

Top-secret documents from the archive of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden show the National Security Agency can now automatically recognize the content within phone calls by creating rough transcripts and phonetic representations that can be easily searched and stored.

The documents show NSA analysts celebrating the development of what they called “Google for Voice” nearly a decade ago.

Though perfect transcription of natural conversation apparently remains the Intelligence Community’s “holy grail,” the Snowden documents describe extensive use of keyword searching as well as computer programs designed to analyze and “extract” the content of voice conversations, and even use sophisticated algorithms to flag conversations of interest.

The documents include vivid examples of the use of speech recognition in war zones like Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as in Latin America. But they leave unclear exactly how widely the spy agency uses this ability, particularly in programs that pick up considerable amounts of conversations that include people who live in or are citizens of the United States.

Spying on international telephone calls has always been a staple of NSA surveillance, but the requirement that an actual person do the listening meant it was effectively limited to a tiny percentage of the total traffic. By leveraging advances in automated speech recognition, the NSA has entered the era of bulk listening.

And this has happened with no apparent public oversight, hearings or legislative action. Congress hasn’t shown signs of even knowing that it’s going on.

The USA Freedom Act — the surveillance reform bill that Congress is currently debating — doesn’t address the topic at all. The bill would end an NSA program that does not collect voice content: the government’s bulk collection of domestic calling data, showing who called who and for how long.

Even if becomes law, the bill would leave in place a multitude of mechanisms exposed by Snowden that scoop up vast amounts of innocent people’s text and voice communications in the U.S. and across the globe.

Civil liberty experts contacted by The Intercept said the NSA’s speech-to-text capabilities are a disturbing example of the privacy invasions that are becoming possible as our analog world transitions to a digital one.

“I think people don’t understand that the economics of surveillance have totally changed,” Jennifer Granick, civil liberties director at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, told The Intercept.

“Once you have this capability, then the question is: How will it be deployed? Can you temporarily cache all American phone calls, transcribe all the phone calls, and do text searching of the content of the calls?” she said. “It may not be what they are doing right now, but they’ll be able to do it.”

And, she asked: “How would we ever know if they change the policy?”

Indeed, NSA officials have been secretive about their ability to convert speech to text, and how widely they use it, leaving open any number of possibilities.

That secrecy is the key, Granick said. “We don’t have any idea how many innocent people are being affected, or how many of those innocent people are also Americans.”

I Can Search Against It

NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, who was trained as a voice processing crypto-linguist and worked at the agency until 2008, told The Intercept that he saw a huge push after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks to turn the massive amounts of voice communications being collected into something more useful.

Human listening was clearly not going to be the solution. “There weren’t enough ears,” he said.

The transcripts that emerged from the new systems weren’t perfect, he said. “But even if it’s not 100 percent, I can still get a lot more information. It’s far more accessible. I can search against it.”

Converting speech to text makes it easier for the NSA to see what it has collected and stored, according to Drake. “The breakthrough was being able to do it on a vast scale,” he said.

More Data, More Power, Better Performance

The Defense Department, through its Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), started funding academic and commercial research into speech recognition in the early 1970s.

What emerged were several systems to turn speech into text, all of which slowly but gradually improved as they were able to work with more data and at faster speeds.

In a brief interview, Dan Kaufman, director of DARPA’s Information Innovation Office, indicated that the government’s ability to automate transcription is still limited.

Kaufman says that automated transcription of phone conversation is “super hard,” because “there’s a lot of noise on the signal” and “it’s informal as hell.”

“I would tell you we are not very good at that,” he said.

In an ideal environment like a news broadcast, he said, “we’re getting pretty good at being able to do these types of translations.”

A 2008 document from the Snowden archive shows that transcribing news broadcasts was already working well seven years ago, using a program called Enhanced Video Text and Audio Processing:

(U//FOUO) EViTAP is a fully-automated news monitoring tool. The key feature of this Intelink-SBU-hosted tool is that it analyzes news in six languages, including Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, Spanish, English, and Farsi/Persian. “How does it work?” you may ask. It integrates Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) which provides transcripts of the spoken audio. Next, machine translation of the ASR transcript translates the native language transcript to English. Voila! Technology is amazing.

A version of the system the NSA uses is now even available commercially.

Experts in speech recognition say that in the last decade or so, the pace of technological improvement has been explosive. As information storage became cheaper and more efficient, technology companies were able to store massive amounts of voice data on their servers, allowing them to continually update and improve the models. Enormous processors, tuned as “deep neural networks” that detect patterns like human brains do, produce much cleaner transcripts.

And the Snowden documents show that the same kinds of leaps forward seen in commercial speech-to-text products have also been happening in secret at the NSA, fueled by the agency’s singular access to astronomical processing power and its own vast data archives.

In fact, the NSA has been repeatedly releasing new and improved speech recognition systems for more than a decade.

The first-generation tool, which made keyword-searching of vast amounts of voice content possible, was rolled out in 2004 and code-named RHINEHART.

The memo says that intelligence analysts involved in counterterrorism were able to identify terms related to bomb-making materials, like “detonator” and “hydrogen peroxide,” as well as place names like “Baghdad” or people like “Musharaf.”

RHINEHART was “designed to support both real-time searches, in which incoming data is automatically searched by a designated set of dictionaries, and retrospective searches, in which analysts can repeatedly search over months of past traffic,” the memo explains (emphasis in original).

As of 2006, RHINEHART was operating “across a wide variety of missions and languages” and was “used throughout the NSA/CSS [Central Security Service] Enterprise.”

But even then, a newer, more sophisticated product was already being rolled out by the NSA’s Human Language Technology (HLT) program office. The new system, called VoiceRT, was first introduced in Baghdad, and “designed to index and tag 1 million cuts per day.”

The goal, according to another 2006 memo, was to use voice processing technology to be able “index, tag and graph,” all intercepted communications. “Using HLT services, a single analyst will be able to sort through millions of cuts per day and focus on only the small percentage that is relevant,” the memo states.

A 2009 memo from the NSA’s British partner, GCHQ, describes how “NSA have had the BBN speech-to-text system Byblos running at Fort Meade for at least 10 years. (Initially they also had Dragon.) During this period they have invested heavily in producing their own corpora of transcribed Sigint in both American English and an increasing range of other languages.” (GCHQ also noted that it had its own small corpora of transcribed voice communications, most of which happened to be “Northern Irish accented speech.”)

VoiceRT, in turn, was surpassed a few years after its launch. According to the intelligence community’s “Black Budget” for fiscal year 2013, VoiceRT was decommissioned and replaced in 2011 and 2012, so that by 2013, NSA could operationalize a new system. This system, apparently called SPIRITFIRE, could handle more data, faster. SPIRITFIRE would be “a more robust voice processing capability based on speech-to-text keyword search and paired dialogue transcription.”

Extensive Use Abroad

Voice communications can be collected by the NSA whether they are being sent by regular phone lines, over cellular networks, or through voice-over-internet services. Previously released documents from the Snowden archive describe enormous efforts by the NSA during the last decade to get access to voice-over-internet content like Skype calls, for instance. And other documents in the archive chronicle the agency’s adjustment to the fact that an increasingly large percentage of conversations, even those that start as landline or mobile calls, end up as digitized packets flying through the same fiber-optic cables that the NSA taps so effectively for other data and voice communications.

The Snowden archive, as searched and analyzed by The Intercept, documents extensive use of speech-to-text by the NSA to search through international voice intercepts — particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as Mexico and Latin America.

For example, speech-to-text was a key but previously unheralded element of the sophisticated analytical program known as the Real Time Regional Gateway (RTRG), which started in 2005 when newly appointed NSA chief Keith B. Alexander, according to the Washington Post, “wanted everything: Every Iraqi text message, phone call and e-mail that could be vacuumed up by the agency’s powerful computers.”

The Real Time Regional Gateway was credited with playing a role in “breaking up Iraqi insurgent networks and significantly reducing the monthly death toll from improvised explosive devices.” The indexing and searching of “voice cuts” was deployed to Iraq in 2006. By 2008, RTRG was operational in Afghanistan as well.

Keyword spotting extended to Iranian intercepts as well. A 2006 memo reported that RHINEHART had been used successfully by Persian-speaking analysts who “searched for the words ‘negotiations’ or ‘America’ in their traffic, and RHINEHART located a very important call that was transcribed verbatim providing information on an important Iranian target’s discussion of the formation of a the new Iraqi government.”

According to a 2011 memo, “How is Human Language Technology (HLT) Progressing?“, NSA that year deployed “HLT Labs” to Afghanistan, NSA facilities in Texas and Georgia, and listening posts in Latin America run by the Special Collection Service, a joint NSA/CIA unit that operates out of embassies and other locations.

“Spanish is the most mature of our speech-to-text analytics,” the memo says, noting that the NSA and its Special Collections Service sites in Latin America, have had “great success searching for Spanish keywords.”

The memo offers an example from NSA Texas, where an analyst newly trained on the system used a keyword search to find previously unreported information on a target involved in drug-trafficking. In another case, an official at a Special Collection Service site in Latin America “was able to find foreign intelligence regarding a Cuban official in a fraction of the usual time.”

In a 2011 article, “Finding Nuggets — Quickly — in a Heap of Voice Collection, From Mexico to Afghanistan,” an intelligence analysis technical director from NSA Texas described the “rare life-changing instance” when he learned about human language technology, and its ability to “find the exact traffic of interest within a mass of collection.”

Analysts in Texas found the new technology a boon for spying. “From finding tunnels in Tijuana, identifying bomb threats in the streets of Mexico City, or shedding light on the shooting of US Customs officials in Potosi, Mexico, the technology did what it advertised: It accelerated the process of finding relevant intelligence when time was of the essence,” he wrote. (Emphasis in original.)

The author of the memo was also part of a team that introduced the technology to military leaders in Afghanistan. “From Kandahar to Kabul, we have traveled the country explaining NSA leaders’ vision and introducing SIGINT teams to what HLT analytics can do today and to what is still needed to make this technology a game-changing success,” the memo reads.

Extent of Domestic Use Remains Unknown

What’s less clear from the archive is how extensively this capability is used to transcribe or otherwise index and search voice conversations that primarily involve what the NSA terms “U.S. persons.”

The NSA did not answer a series of detailed questions about automated speech recognition, even though an NSA “classification guide” that is part of the Snowden archive explicitly states that “The fact that NSA/CSS has created HLT models” for speech-to-text processing as well as gender, language and voice recognition, is “UNCLASSIFIED.”

Also unclassified: The fact that the processing can sort and prioritize audio files for human linguists, and that the statistical models are regularly being improved and updated based on actual intercepts. By contrast, because they’ve been tuned using actual intercepts, the specific parameters of the systems are highly classified.

“The National Security Agency employs a variety of technologies in the course of its authorized foreign-intelligence mission,” spokesperson Vanee’ Vines wrote in an email to The Intercept. “These capabilities, operated by NSA’s dedicated professionals and overseen by multiple internal and external authorities, help to deter threats from international terrorists, human traffickers, cyber criminals, and others who seek to harm our citizens and allies.”

Vines did not respond to the specific questions about privacy protections in place related to the processing of domestic or domestic-to-international voice communications. But she wrote that “NSA always applies rigorous protections designed to safeguard the privacy not only of U.S. persons, but also of foreigners abroad, as directed by the President in January 2014.”

The presidentially appointed but independent Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) didn’t mention speech-to-text technology in its public reports.

“I’m not going to get into whether any program does or does not have that capability,” PCLOB chairman David Medine told The Intercept.

His board’s reports, he said, contained only information that the intelligence community agreed could be declassified.

“We went to the intelligence community and asked them to declassify a significant amount of material,” he said. The “vast majority” of that material was declassified, he said. But not all — including “facts that we thought could be declassified without compromising national security.”

Hypothetically, Medine said, the ability to turn voice into text would raise significant privacy concerns. And it would also raise questions about how the intelligence agencies “minimize” the retention and dissemination of material— particularly involving U.S. persons — that doesn’t include information they’re explicitly allowed to keep.

“Obviously it increases the ability of the government to process information from more calls,” Medine said. “It would also allow the government to listen in on more calls, which would raise more of the kind of privacy issues that the board has raised in the past.”

“I’m not saying the government does or doesn’t do it,” he said, “just that these would be the consequences.”

A New Learning Curve

Speech recognition expert Bhiksha Raj likens the current era to the early days of the Internet, when people didn’t fully realize how the things they typed would last forever.

“When I started using the Internet in the 90s, I was just posting stuff,” said Raj, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Language Technologies Institute. “It never struck me that 20 years later I could go Google myself and pull all this up. Imagine if I posted something on alt.binaries.pictures.erotica or something like that, and now that post is going to embarrass me forever.”

The same is increasingly becoming the case with voice communication, he said. And the stakes are even higher, given that the majority of the world’s communication has historically been conducted by voice, and it has traditionally been considered a private mode of communication.

“People still aren’t realizing quite the magnitude that the problem could get to,” Raj said. “And it’s not just surveillance,” he said. “People are using voice services all the time. And where does the voice go? It’s sitting somewhere. It’s going somewhere. You’re living on trust.” He added: “Right now I don’t think you can trust anybody.”

The Need for New Rules

Kim Taipale, executive director of the Stilwell Center for Advanced Studies in Science and Technology Policy, is one of several people who tried a decade ago to get policymakers to recognize that existing surveillance law doesn’t adequately deal with new global communication networks and advanced technologies including speech recognition.

“Things aren’t ephemeral anymore,” Taipale told The Intercept. “We’re living in a world where many things that were fleeting in the analog world are now on the permanent record. The question then becomes: what are the consequences of that and what are the rules going to be to deal with those consequences?”

Realistically, Taipale said, “the ability of the government to search voice communication in bulk is one of the things we may have to live with under some circumstances going forward.” But there at least need to be “clear public rules and effective oversight to make sure that the information is only used for appropriate law-enforcement or national security purposes consistent with Constitutional principles.”

Ultimately, Taipale said, a system where computers flag suspicious voice communications could be less invasive than one where people do the listening, given the potential for human abuse and misuse to lead to privacy violations. “Automated analysis has different privacy implications,” he said.

But to Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, the distinction between a human listening and a computer listening is irrelevant in terms of privacy, possible consequences, and a chilling effect on speech.

“What people care about in the end, and what creates chilling effects in the end, are consequences,” he said. “I think that over time, people would learn to fear computerized eavesdropping just as much as they fear eavesdropping by humans, because of the consequences that it could bring.”

Indeed, computer listening could raise new concerns. One of the internal NSA memos from 2006 says an “important enhancement under development is the ability for this HLT capability to predict what intercepted data might be of interest to analysts based on the analysts’ past behavior.”

Citing Amazon’s ability to not just track but predict buyer preferences, the memo says that an NSA system designed to flag interesting intercepts “offers the promise of presenting analysts with highly enriched sorting of their traffic.”

To Phillip Rogaway, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Davis, keyword-search is probably the “least of our problems.” In an email to The Intercept, Rogaway warned that “When the NSA identifies someone as ‘interesting’ based on contemporary NLP [Natural Language Processing] methods, it might be that there is no human-understandable explanation as to why beyond: ‘his corpus of discourse resembles those of others whom we thought interesting’; or the conceptual opposite: ‘his discourse looks or sounds different from most people’s.’”

If the algorithms NSA computers use to identify threats are too complex for humans to understand, Rogaway wrote, “it will be impossible to understand the contours of the surveillance apparatus by which one is judged. All that people will be able to do is to try your best to behave just like everyone else.”

Massive ‘Islamophobia industry’ flourishes in US

May 5, 2015

RT

There is a burgeoning industry provoking non-Muslims in Europe and in the US to attack Muslims and other ethnic minorities which is disproportional and only breeds further hatred, Mohammed Ansar, political and social commentator, told RT.

RT: There’s been a whole string of incidents in Europe similar to the attack in Texas, in which two gunmen were killed Sunday outside a controversial art event depicting the Prophet Muhammad cartoons and dedicated to free speech. Has a new threat now arrived in America?

Mohammed Ansar: Clearly what we have seen is that the attacks have been going on in Europe is the opening of a long-held debate around freedom of expression, against freedom to offend. Now we’ve seen this being picked up by what they call the counter-jihadists movement here in America. And there is an estimated $200 million Islamophobia industry now in the US. And so we’ve seen – shortly after the attacks on Charlie Hebdo – there was a stand by the Prophet Mohammed conference at this exact same conference center in Garland, Texas, and now we’ve seen hate preachers who have been banned from coming to Europe like Geert Wilders, Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, now have something which will ostensibly incite hate and violence. Now we’ve seen a reaction and I think it’s to be deplored on all sides – the right to offend, the right to incite violence and hatred, but also the violence and hatred that ensues. At this time our thoughts and concerns have to be with the families of those people who were slain.

RT: How do you put an end to such attacks? What is fuelling them in the first place?

MA: The answer to hate is not more hate. The answer to hate has to be to increase love, peace, tolerance and coexistence in society. In the US they have a far more difficult situation. In the UK and in Europe we have Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights which talks about the freedom of expression. Much is then held in Article 10, part 2, which talks about limitations on freedom of speech. So we have nation states in Europe who are quite used to putting certain limitations around hate speech, around attacking minority groups and spreading hate and fear and incitement of violence even in the national interest in certain instances. In the US, in their Conventions, they do have a constitutional right to freedom of expression. However we’ve seen three Democratic Congressmen, I think we saw Keith Ellison, Andre Carson, and Joe Crowley who came forward and asked the Homeland Security and also the Secretary of State, John Kerry, to put limitations on this. They said that there is bedrock of freedom of speech in the US; however what we don’t want to have is incitement of violence and hate speech.

RT: Incidents like this do breed hate for Islam, while there are millions of Muslims who are non-violent law abiding citizens all across Europe and in the US. How can governments address those tensions?

MA: Hate preachers like Geert Wilders, Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer will want to give the idea that there are millions of Muslims who have radical and extremist ideas. Muslims have been living, co-existing and integrating in communities. They are in fact the bedrock of the European civilization whether it’s science or learning or education. So I think the first thing we have to do is to stop the provocation and stop the hate speech. There is no kind of apology for the retaliation through violence. So people have the right of freedom of expression. People also have the right not to be limited by taboos of other people in the society. However there is a burgeoning industry now in provoking non-Muslims in Europe and in the US to attack Muslims. And this is disproportional. We saw the argument with Charlie Hebdo before: they are not equal opportunities offenders; they are targeting disproportionally ethnic minorities and Muslims. So I think we have to restate what the ground rules are. You have the right to freedom of expression, freedom of speech. You don’t have the right to incite hate; you don’t have the right to incite violence. And it is certainly far more offensive to respond in violence than it is to have the freedom of expression which some people may find troublesome.

The US is not some sort of an island that ISIS could not reach

The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for an attack at an exhibition in Texas featuring cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed. The announcement was made on the group’s radio station. According to Marwa Osman, political Commentator in Beirut, this could very well be the case.

RT: Do you believe this claim made by Islamic State?

MO: Anything is anticipated from the Islamic State. How hard can it be for the supporters of ISIS who actually abide by the Wahhabi religion not to perform anything that is considered dangerous in any nation? These people have come from all over the world to Syria, to Libya, to the Middle East to fight for some reason- no one knows why. It is obvious when they return back to their homeland it is going to be dangerous and it is going to be risky. Whether it is a provocative event or not, it is going to be risky having them back in their homeland…

RT: With this announcement does this mean that Islamic State is now functioning in the US?

MO: It has been functioning in the US before it even came to the Middle East, before it came to us and brought its terror to us… The US is not some sort of an island that ISIS could not reach. It can simply reach the youth of America via Twitter, Facebook, via social media in general. So it was anticipated, but the event as well was by itself provocative for such groups. They went out and performed their terror. Here we’re talking about two different events that came into one event. The FBI already knew about one of the suspects – his surname is Simpson for the irony. They knew that he was an actual suspect and they did nothing, he was free. Talking about the event, you have people for months planning an anti-Islamic event to bring out certain cartoons against Prophet Mohammed…

RT: What about a US political agenda? Does this work for Washington that ISIS is allegedly in America?

MO: Of course, it is going to work as much as it is working in France after what happened at Charlie Hebdo. It is going to have the same effect on the entire American public, not only on the Islamic public. Though, it’s going to be more of a direct insult, let’s say on the Islamic public in America. Let’s be very frank here: whether we support it or not we’re [Islamic people] going to be targets.

RT: The US military launching Jade Helm 15 over the summer including a series of training, military drills across the south-west with over a thousand special-ops troops. ISIS is also operating in the south-west. Is it time for conspiracy theories to put on their tinfoil hats?

MO: It is not a conspiracy theory. It is planning, it is tactics, it is a full-time strategy that the US is working on which explains what is going on in the Middle East. In some countries they are fighting ISIS, and in the others – they are sending arms for them to fight people or groups who the US thinks that they have certain interest in eliminating from the entire region of the Middle East. It is more obvious in the Middle East than it is in the West. But now when it hits the West’s homeland, people there are going to start thinking about it. Unfortunately the propaganda, the media there is going to play a very good game to convince the public that now ISIS is a big threat and we have to go and fight. And the people will not know whether the US will go and fight or where this fighting will happen.

Ukraine named worst performing economy in 2015- The Economist

May 8, 2015

RT

Ukraine has the fastest falling economy of 2015 according to the British periodical The Economist. The country has seen its GDP shrink by 6.5 percent since last April, with countries like Libya and Macau performing better.

The Ukrainian economy showed the most significant deepening recession compared to the rest of the world, according to the data, published on Wednesday by the head of the analytical department of the Economist Robert Ward. The research compared the one-year GDP growth of countries since April 2014. Libya’s economy dropped by 6.4 percent while Macau which turned out to be the third worst performing economy, experienced a 6 percent GDP decline. Equatorial Guinea came out fourth with a 5.5 percent GDP decline and fifth place went to Russia as its GDP fell by 4 percent.

Greece took fifteenth place, the country’s GDP showed a very slight decrease, according to the Economist.

On Monday, the head of Ukraine’s National Bank Valeria Gontareva said that the country’s economic recession had hit bottom and predicted gradual recovery starting from the second quarter of 2015. Later on Wednesday, the World Bank lowered Ukraine’s economic outlook, projecting the country’s GDP will fall 7.5 percent in 2015.

The Economist also published a ranking of the fastest growing economies in the world up to April, which puts Papua New Guinea on top. Five African countries are among the world’s fastest growing economies. BRICS countries are represented by India at number six and China ranked as the twelfth fastest growing economy.

World Al Qaeda says U.S. strike kills man who claimed Paris killings

May 7, 2015

Reuters

WASHINGTON- Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula said on Thursday a U.S. air strike had killed the senior figure who issued the group’s claim of responsibility for the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris, according to a report.

The SITE Intelligence Group quoted al Qaeda as saying in an online video that AQAP ideologue Nasser bin Ali al-Ansi was killed with his eldest son and other fighters in Yemen.

Ansi’s reported death suggests the covert U.S. drone programme against the Yemen branch of the global militant group is continuing, despite the evacuation of American military advisers from the country amid a worsening civil war.

Ansi, an ideologue and former fighter, had appeared in several of the group’s videos. In a message on Jan. 14, he said of the Jan. 7 attack in Paris that the “one who chose the target, laid the plan and financed the operation is the leadership of the organization”, without naming an individual.

A week later he called for lone-wolf attacks in Western countries like America, Britain, Canada and France, as such operations were “better and more harmful”.

In the Paris attack, 17 people, including journalists and police, were killed in three days of violence, including a mass shooting at the weekly Charlie Hebdo, known for its satirical attacks on Islam and other religions.

The attackers, two French-born brothers of Algerian origin, singled out the magazine for its publication of cartoons depicting and ridiculing the Prophet Mohammad. The bloodshed ended on Jan. 9 with a hostage-taking at a Jewish shop in which four hostages and the gunman were killed.

Ansi had also called for Yemeni Sunnis to confront the Houthi militia which has taken over large parts of Yemen since September. Al Qaeda views Houthis as heretics since they belong to a branch of Shi’ite Islam.

SITE cited media as saying Ansi was killed in a drone strike in Mukalla, a city in Yemen’s Hadramawt governorate, in April, along with his son and six other fighters.

Ansi had fought in Bosnia in the 1990s and worked for al Qaeda in the Philippines and Afghanistan.

On April 14 AQAP announced that one of its leaders, Ibrahim al-Rubaish, had been killed by a U.S. air strike. Rubaish was a Saudi national released from the Guantanamo Bay prison camp in 2006.

The United States has poured aid and personnel into Yemen in recent years as part of its war on Islamist militants.

But it withdrew military personnel and pulled out of the al-Anad military base it was using in Yemen last month, as Iran-allied Shi’ite Muslim Houthi fighters advanced, plunging the impoverished country further into chaos.

(Reporting by Doina Chiacu and William Maclean in Dubai; Editing by Emily Stephenson and Andrew Roche)

Of Snowden and the NSA, only one has acted unlawfully – and it’s not Snowden

With the NSA’s bulk surveillance ruled illegal, the debate on the Patriot Act should be reinvigorated – with Edward Snowden free to join in

May 7, 2015

by James Ball

The Guardian

On 6 June 2013, the Guardian published a secret US court order against the phone company Verizon, ordering it on an “ongoing, daily basis” to hand over the call records of its millions of US customers to the NSA – just one of numerous orders enabling the government’s highly secret domestic mass surveillance program. Just days later the world learned the identity of the whistleblower who made the order public: Edward Snowden.

Now, almost two years later, a US court has vindicated Snowden’s decision, ruling that the bulk surveillance program went beyond what the law underpinning it allowed: the US government used section 215 of the Patriot Act to justify the program. A US court of appeals has ruled the law does not allow for a program so broad. In short, one of the NSA’s most famous and controversial surveillance programs has no legal basis.

Of Snowden and the NSA, only one has so far been found to have acted unlawfully – and it’s not Snowden. That surely must change the nature of the debate on civil liberties being had in America, and it should do so in a number of ways.

The first is the surprisingly thorny question of what to do with Snowden himself. The whistleblower is in his second year of exile, living in asylum in Russia, as he would surely face criminal prosecution should he return. The nature of the punishment – and pre-trial mistreatment – meted out to Chelsea Manning shows his fears are well founded.

But now the courts have ruled that Snowden’s flagship revelation, the very first and foremost of the programs he disclosed, has no legal basis, who now might challenge his status as a whistleblower?

Certainly not Judge Sack, who in his concurring opinion alongside today’s rulings acknowledged Snowden’s revelations led to this litigation, and likened his disclosures to Daniel Ellsberg’s famous “Pentagon Papers” leak.

If the US government seeks to jail someone who has shown its own security services acting unlawfully, its international reputation will deservedly take a beating. If the US wants moral authority to talk to other governments about whistleblowers and civil liberty, it needs to be brave: it needs to offer Snowden amnesty.

The other actions for the US executive and for Congress are broader. The court of appeals judges very deliberately chose not to consider the constitutionality of NSA bulk surveillance programs, as such questions are currently before Congress with the ongoing debate on how to reform the Patriot Act.

Congress should allow this ruling to reinvigorate that debate, and in a sense the ruling forces it to do so. If Congress want a law that allows phone surveillance on the scale of the NSA’s existing programs, it will have to explicitly create that: gone is the option of trying to push through something near the status quo with a fringe of reform.

For domestic bulk surveillance to continue and be legal, Congress must explicitly vote for it – and then, in time, the judicial branch will consider the constitutional case in earnest.

If Congress sincerely wishes to curb it, it now has substantial backing from the judicial branch to push forward and do that. Reformers finally have the jolt in the arm they needed to prevent the positive impact of Snowden’s revelations dribbling away.

The president could also use this ruling as an opportunity to consider his stance. The line endlessly aired by the administration and its officials is that all surveillance is legal. That line is no longer valid. Rather than just seeking a new script – or as is almost certain, merely appealing against the decision – this could be a great opportunity for some introspection. These surveillance programs are wildly expensive and have very few proven results. Why not look at which ones the US really needs, and whether old-fashioned targeted surveillance might not keep us all as safe (or safer), and freer too?

The final debate is one that is unlikely to happen, but should: the US needs to start considering the privacy and freedom of foreigners as well as its own citizens. The US public is rightly concerned about its government spying on them. But citizens of countries around the world, many of them US allies, are also rightly concerned about the US government spying on them.

Considering Americans and foreigners alike in these conversations would be a great moral stance – but pragmatically, it should also help Americans. If the US doesn’t care about the privacy of other countries, it shouldn’t expect foreign governments to care about US citizens. There’s something in this for everyone.

These are the debates we could be having, and should be having. The judiciary has spoken. The legislature is deliberating. The public is debating. And all of it is enabled thanks to information provided by Edward Snowden.

He should be free to join the conversation, in person.

The Clintons and Their Banker Friends

The Wall Street Connection (1992 to 2016)

by Nomi Prins

Tomgram

[This piece has been adapted and updated by Nomi Prins from chapters 18 and 19 of her book All the Presidents' Bankers: The Hidden Alliances that Drive American Power, just out in paperback (Nation Books).]

The past, especially the political past, doesn’t just provide clues to the present. In the realm of the presidency and Wall Street, it provides an ongoing pathway for political-financial relationships and policies that remain a threat to the American economy going forward.

When Hillary Clinton video-announced her bid for the Oval Office, she claimed she wanted to be a “champion” for the American people. Since then, she has attempted to recast herself as a populist and distance herself from some of the policies of her husband. But Bill Clinton did not become president without sharing the friendships, associations, and ideologies of the elite banking sect, nor will Hillary Clinton. Such relationships run too deep and are too longstanding.

To grasp the dangers that the Big Six banks (JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley) presently pose to the financial stability of our nation and the world, you need to understand their history in Washington, starting with the Clinton years of the 1990s. Alliances established then (not exclusively with Democrats, since bankers are bipartisan by nature) enabled these firms to become as politically powerful as they are today and to exert that power over an unprecedented amount of capital. Rest assured of one thing: their past and present CEOs will prove as critical in backing a Hillary Clinton presidency as they were in enabling her husband’s years in office.

In return, today’s titans of finance and their hordes of lobbyists, more than half of whom held prior positions in the government, exact certain requirements from Washington. They need to know that a safety net or bailout will always be available in times of emergency and that the regulatory road will be open to whatever practices they deem most profitable.

Whatever her populist pitch may be in the 2016 campaign — and she will have one — note that, in all these years, Hillary Clinton has not publicly condemned Wall Street or any individual Wall Street leader. Though she may, in the heat of that campaign, raise the bad-apples or bad-situation explanation for Wall Street’s role in the financial crisis of 2007-2008, rest assured that she will not point fingers at her friends. She will not chastise the people that pay her hundreds of thousands of dollars a pop to speak or the ones that have long shared the social circles in which she and her husband move. She is an undeniable component of the Clinton political-financial legacy that came to national fruition more than 23 years ago, which is why looking back at the history of the first Clinton presidency is likely to tell you so much about the shape and character of the possible second one.

The 1992 Election and the Rise of Bill Clinton

Challenging President George H.W. Bush, who was seeking a second term, Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton announced he would seek the 1992 Democratic nomination for the presidency on October 2, 1991. The upcoming presidential election would not, however, turn out to alter the path of mergers or White House support for deregulation that was already in play one iota.

First, though, Clinton needed money. A consummate fundraiser in his home state, he cleverly amassed backing and established early alliances with Wall Street. One of his key supporters would later change American banking forever. As Clinton put it, he received “invaluable early support” from Ken Brody, a Goldman Sachs executive seeking to delve into Democratic politics. Brody took Clinton “to a dinner with high-powered New York businesspeople, including Bob Rubin, whose tightly reasoned arguments for a new economic policy,” Clinton later wrote, “made a lasting impression on me.”

The battle for the White House kicked into high gear the following fall. William Schreyer, chairman and CEO of Merrill Lynch, showed his support for Bush by giving the maximum personal contribution to his campaign committee permitted by law: $1,000. But he wanted to do more. So when one of Bush’s fundraisers solicited him to contribute to the Republican National Committee’s nonfederal, or “soft money,” account, Schreyer made a $100,000 donation.

The bankers’ alliances remained divided among the candidates at first, as they considered which man would be best for their own power trajectories, but their donations were plentiful: mortgage and broker company contributions were $1.2 million; 46% to the GOP and 54% to the Democrats. Commercial banks poured in $14.8 million to the 1992 campaigns at a near 50-50 split.

Clinton, like every good Democrat, campaigned publicly against the bankers: “It’s time to end the greed that consumed Wall Street and ruined our S&Ls [Savings and Loans] in the last decade,” he said. But equally, he had no qualms about taking money from the financial sector. In the early months of his campaign, BusinessWeek estimated that he received $2 million of his initial $8.5 million in contributions from New York, under the care of Ken Brody.

“If I had a Ken Brody working for me in every state, I’d be like the Maytag man with nothing to do,” said Rahm Emanuel, who ran Clinton’s nationwide fundraising committee and later became Barack Obama’s chief of staff. Wealthy donors and prospective fundraisers were invited to a select series of intimate meetings with Clinton at the plush Manhattan office of the prestigious private equity firm Blackstone.

Robert Rubin Comes to Washington

Clinton knew that embracing the bankers would help him get things done in Washington, and what he wanted to get done dovetailed nicely with their desires anyway. To facilitate his policies and maintain ties to Wall Street, he selected a man who had been instrumental to his campaign, Robert Rubin, as his economic adviser.

On January 25, 1993, Clinton appointed him as assistant to the president for economic policy. Shortly thereafter, the president created a unique role for his comrade, head of the newly created National Economic Council. “I asked Bob Rubin to take on a new job,” Clinton later wrote, “coordinating economic policy in the White House as Chairman of the National Economic Council, which would operate in much the same way the National Security Council did, bringing all the relevant agencies together to formulate and implement policy… [I]f he could balance all of [Goldman Sachs’] egos and interests, he had a good chance to succeed with the job.” (Ten years later, President George W. Bush gave the same position to Rubin’s old partner, Friedman.)

Back at Goldman, Jon Corzine, co-head of fixed income, and Henry Paulson, co-head of investment banking, were ascending through the ranks. They became co-CEOs when Friedman retired at the end of 1994.

Those two men were the perfect bipartisan duo. Corzine was a staunch Democrat serving on the International Capital Markets Advisory Committee of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (from 1989 to 1999). He would co-chair a presidential commission for Clinton on capital budgeting between 1997 and 1999, while serving in a key role on the Borrowing Advisory Committee of the Treasury Department. Paulson was a well connected Republican and Harvard graduate who had served on the White House Domestic Council as staff assistant to the president in the Nixon administration.

Bankers Forge Ahead

By May 1995, Rubin was impatiently warning Congress that the Glass-Steagall Act could “conceivably impede safety and soundness by limiting revenue diversification.” Banking deregulation was then inching through Congress. As they had during the previous Bush administration, both the House and Senate Banking Committees had approved separate versions of legislation to repeal Glass-Steagall, the 1933 Act passed by the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt that had separated deposit-taking and lending or “commercial” bank activities from speculative or “investment bank” activities, such as securities creation and trading. Conference negotiations had fallen apart, though, and the effort was stalled.

By 1996, however, other industries, representing core clients of the banking sector, were already being deregulated. On February 8, 1996, Clinton signed the Telecom Act, which killed many independent and smaller broadcasting companies by opening a national market for “cross-ownership.” The result was mass mergers in that sector advised by banks.

Deregulation of companies that could transport energy across state lines came next. Before such deregulation, state commissions had regulated companies that owned power plants and transmission lines, which worked together to distribute power. Afterward, these could be divided and effectively traded without uniform regulation or responsibility to regional customers. This would lead to blackouts in California and a slew of energy derivatives, as well as trades at firms such as Enron that used the energy business as a front for fraudulent deals.

The number of mergers and stock and debt issuances ballooned on the back of all the deregulation that eliminated barriers that had kept companies separated. As industries consolidated, they also ramped up their complex transactions and special purpose vehicles (off-balance-sheet, offshore constructions tailored by the banking community to hide the true nature of their debts and shield their profits from taxes). Bankers kicked into overdrive to generate fees and create related deals. Many of these blew up in the early 2000s in a spate of scandals and bankruptcies, causing an earlier millennium recession.

Meanwhile, though, bankers plowed ahead with their advisory services, speculative enterprises, and deregulation pursuits. President Clinton and his team would soon provide them an epic gift, all in the name of U.S. global power and competitiveness. Robert Rubin would steer the White House ship to that goal.

On February 12, 1999, Rubin found a fresh angle to argue on behalf of banking deregulation. He addressed the House Committee on Banking and Financial Services, claiming that, “the problem U.S. financial services firms face abroad is more one of access than lack of competitiveness.”

He was referring to the European banks’ increasing control of distribution channels into the European institutional and retail client base. Unlike U.S. commercial banks, European banks had no restrictions keeping them from buying and teaming up with U.S. or other securities firms and investment banks to create or distribute their products. He did not appear concerned about the destruction caused by sizeable financial bets throughout Europe. The international competitiveness argument allowed him to focus the committee on what needed to be done domestically in the banking sector to remain competitive.

Rubin stressed the necessity of HR 665, the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, or the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, that was officially introduced on February 10, 1999. He said it took “fundamental actions to modernize our financial system by repealing the Glass-Steagall Act prohibitions on banks affiliating with securities firms and repealing the Bank Holding Company Act prohibitions on insurance underwriting.”

The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act Marches Forward

On February 24, 1999, in more testimony before the Senate Banking Committee, Rubin pushed for fewer prohibitions on bank affiliates that wanted to perform the same functions as their larger bank holding company, once the different types of financial firms could legally merge. That minor distinction would enable subsidiaries to place all sorts of bets and house all sorts of junk under the false premise that they had the same capital beneath them as their parent. The idea that a subsidiary’s problems can’t taint or destroy the host, or bank holding company, or create “catastrophic” risk, is a myth perpetuated by bankers and political enablers that continues to this day.

Rubin had no qualms with mega-consolidations across multiple service lines. His real problems were those of his banker friends, which lay with the financial modernization bill’s “prohibition on the use of subsidiaries by larger banks.” The bankers wanted the right to establish off-book subsidiaries where they could hide risks, and profits, as needed.

Again, Rubin decided to use the notion of remaining competitive with foreign banks to make his point. This technicality was “unacceptable to the administration,” he said, not least because “foreign banks underwrite and deal in securities through subsidiaries in the United States, and U.S. banks [already] conduct securities and merchant banking activities abroad through so-called Edge subsidiaries.” Rubin got his way. These off-book, risky, and barely regulated subsidiaries would be at the forefront of the 2008 financial crisis.

On March 1, 1999, Senator Phil Gramm released a final draft of the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 and scheduled committee consideration for March 4th. A bevy of excited financial titans who were close to Clinton, including Travelers CEO Sandy Weill, Bank of America CEO, Hugh McColl, and American Express CEO Harvey Golub, called for “swift congressional action.”

The Quintessential Revolving-Door Man

The stock market continued its meteoric rise in anticipation of a banker-friendly conclusion to the legislation that would deregulate their industry. Rising consumer confidence reflected the nation’s fondness for the markets and lack of empathy with the rest of the world’s economic plight. On March 29, 1999, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above 10,000 for the first time. Six weeks later, on May 6th, the Financial Services Modernization Act passed the Senate. It legalized, after the fact, the merger that created the nation’s biggest bank. Citigroup, the marriage of Citibank and Travelers, had been finalized the previous October.

It was not until that point that one of Glass-Steagall’s main assassins decided to leave Washington. Six days after the bill passed the Senate, on May 12, 1999, Robert Rubin abruptly announced his resignation. As Clinton wrote, “I believed he had been the best and most important treasury secretary since Alexander Hamilton… He had played a decisive role in our efforts to restore economic growth and spread its benefits to more Americans.”

Clinton named Larry Summers to succeed Rubin. Two weeks later, BusinessWeek reported signs of trouble in merger paradise — in the form of a growing rift between John Reed, the former Chairman of Citibank, and Sandy Weill at the new Citigroup. As Reed said, “Co-CEOs are hard.” Perhaps to patch their rift, or simply to take advantage of a political opportunity, the two men enlisted a third person to join their relationship — none other than Robert Rubin.

Rubin’s resignation from Treasury became effective on July 2nd. At that time, he announced, “This almost six and a half years has been all-consuming, and I think it is time for me to go home to New York and to do whatever I’m going to do next.” Rubin became chairman of Citigroup’s executive committee and a member of the newly created “office of the chairman.” His initial annual compensation package was worth around $40 million. It was more than worth the “hit” he took when he left Goldman for the Treasury post.

Three days after the conference committee endorsed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley bill, Rubin assumed his Citigroup position, joining the institution destined to dominate the financial industry. That very same day, Reed and Weill issued a joint statement praising Washington for “liberating our financial companies from an antiquated regulatory structure,” stating that “this legislation will unleash the creativity of our industry and ensure our global competitiveness.”

On November 4th, the Senate approved the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act by a vote of 90 to 8. (The House voted 362–57 in favor.) Critics famously referred to it as the Citigroup Authorization Act.

Mirth abounded in Clinton’s White House. “Today Congress voted to update the rules that have governed financial services since the Great Depression and replace them with a system for the twenty-first century,” Summers said. “This historic legislation will better enable American companies to compete in the new economy.”

But the happiness was misguided. Deregulating the banking industry might have helped the titans of Wall Street but not people on Main Street. The Clinton era epitomized the vast difference between appearance and reality, spin and actuality. As the decade drew to a close, Clinton basked in the glow of a lofty stock market, a budget surplus, and the passage of this key banking “modernization.” It would be revealed in the 2000s that many corporate profits of the 1990s were based on inflated evaluations, manipulation, and fraud. When Clinton left office, the gap between rich and poor was greater than it had been in 1992, and yet the Democrats heralded him as some sort of prosperity hero.

When he resigned in 1997, Robert Reich, Clinton’s labor secretary, said, “America is prospering, but the prosperity is not being widely shared, certainly not as widely shared as it once was… We have made progress in growing the economy. But growing together again must be our central goal in the future.” Instead, the growth of wealth inequality in the United States accelerated, as the men yielding the most financial power wielded it with increasingly less culpability or restriction. By 2015, that wealth or prosperity gap would stand near historic highs.

The power of the bankers increased dramatically in the wake of the repeal of Glass-Steagall. The Clinton administration had rendered twenty-first-century banking practices similar to those of the pre-1929 crash. But worse. “Modernizing” meant utilizing government-backed depositors’ funds as collateral for the creation and distribution of all types of complex securities and derivatives whose proliferation would be increasingly quick and dangerous.

Eviscerating Glass-Steagall allowed big banks to compete against Europe and also enabled them to go on a rampage: more acquisitions, greater speculation, and more risky products. The big banks used their bloated balance sheets to engage in more complex activity, while counting on customer deposits and loans as capital chips on the global betting table. Bankers used hefty trading profits and wealth to increase lobbying funds and campaign donations, creating an endless circle of influence and mutual reinforcement of boundary-less speculation, endorsed by the White House.

Deposits could be used to garner larger windfalls, just as cheap labor and commodities in developing countries were used to formulate more expensive goods for profit in the upper echelons of the global financial hierarchy. Energy and telecoms proved especially fertile ground for the investment banking fee business (and later for fraud, extensive lawsuits, and bankruptcies). Deregulation greased the wheels of complex financial instruments such as collateralized debt obligations, junk bonds, toxic assets, and unregulated derivatives.

The Glass-Steagall repeal led to unfettered derivatives growth and unstable balance sheets at commercial banks that merged with investment banks and at investment banks that preferred to remain solo but engaged in dodgier practices to remain “competitive.” In conjunction with the tight political-financial alignment and associated collaboration that began with Bush and increased under Clinton, bankers channeled the 1920s, only with more power over an immense and growing pile of global financial assets and increasingly “open” markets. In the process, accountability would evaporate.

Every bank accelerated its hunt for acquisitions and deposits to amass global influence while creating, trading, and distributing increasingly convoluted securities and derivatives. These practices would foster the kind of shaky, interconnected, and opaque financial environment that provided the backdrop and conditions leading up to the financial meltdown of 2008.

The Realities of 2016

Hillary Clinton is, of course, not her husband. But her access to his past banker alliances, amplified by the ones that she has formed herself, makes her more of a friend than an adversary to the banking industry. In her brief 2008 candidacy, all four of the New York-based Big Six banks ranked among her top 10 corporate donors. They have also contributed to the Clinton Foundation. She needs them to win, just as both Barack Obama and Bill Clinton did.

No matter what spin is used for campaigning purposes, the idea that a critical distance can be maintained between the White House and Wall Street is naïve given the multiple channels of money and favors that flow between the two. It is even more improbable, given the history of connections that Hillary Clinton has established through her associations with key bank leaders in the early 1990s, during her time as a senator from New York, and given their contributions to the Clinton foundation while she was secretary of state. At some level, the situation couldn’t be less complicated: her path aligns with that of the country’s most powerful bankers. If she becomes president, that will remain the case.

Nomi Prins is the author of six books, a speaker, and a distinguished senior fellow at the non-partisan public policy institute Demos. Her most recent book, All the Presidents’ Bankers: The Hidden Alliances that Drive American Power (Nation Books) has just been released in paperback and this piece is adapted and updated from it. She is a former Wall Street executive.

]]>0adminhttp://www.tbrnews.org/?p=9862015-05-01T11:16:01Z2015-05-01T11:16:01ZThe Voice of the White House

Washington, D.C. April 30, 2015: “As the rioting in Baltimore quiets, information is emerging that the dead prisoner had suffered injuries earlier in a car accident and, accocrding to statements by other prisoners in the police van, was attempting to injure himself. Once the rioting died down in Ferguson, it emerged that the police gunshot victim was walking down the center of a street and when told by a police officer in a car, he attacked the officer, punching him in the face. A Federally supervised autopsy disclosed that the dead man had been shot, at close range, in the front and witnesses who testified that the officer shot the man when he was running away, admitted they lied. Perhaps before the American, and foreign, media make loud noises about such indicents that they try to wait until the facts emerge before basicicially instigating riots, lootings and burnings.”

Freddie Gray ‘died from head injury in police van’

May 1, 2015

BBC News

Freddie Gray died when his head struck a bolt in a Baltimore police van, a local US TV news station has reported.

Citing police sources, ABC7 News said that an injury to Gray’s head matched the shape of a bolt in the van.

Gray suffered a fatal spine injury while in police custody, sparking two weeks of protests in Baltimore which turned violent earlier this week.

His death is the latest in a series of police killings in the US which have sparked rioting and national debate.

Baltimore police have admitted that Gray was not secured in the van by a seatbelt, against department policy, and that he requested medical attention while being transported in the van but was denied.

Video footage filmed by a passerby showed a visibly distressed Gray being handcuffed on the ground pushed into the back of the van. Police said he ran after seeing two officers, who chased him and arrested him when they found a switchblade-style knife in his trousers.

Gray lapsed into a coma following the journey on 12 May and died a week later.

Maryland medical examiner’s office has refused to comment on cause of death while the investigation is ongoing.

New footage discovered

The van transporting Gray made a previously undisclosed fourth stop while en route to the police station, police revealed on Thursday.

Previously, police had said the van made three stops, including one to put him in leg irons and another to pick up different prisoner.

The fourth stop was captured on a CCTV camera outside a Korean food shop.

The shop’s owner, Jung Hyun Hwang told the Associated Press news agency that police officers visited last week to make a copy of the recording – which was later lost when the shop was looted during the riots.

Mr Hwang said he had not viewed the recording and did not know what it showed.

Police said the footage was discovered during a view of public and private CCTV cameras in the area.

According to the police timeline of the arrest, the van took 30 minutes to take Gray to the police station, where paramedics were called.

Investigators have now handed over their inquiry into Gray’s death to the state’s attorney’s office.

The city’s top prosecutor, Marilyn Mosby, will now decide whether to take the case to a grand jury to seek an indictment of any of the six officers involved.

Five of the six officers involved in the arrest gave statements to investigators the day Gray was injured. All six have been suspended.

A separate investigation by the US department of justice is also under way.

After two nights of violent protests, Baltimore’s streets were relatively calm on Thursday. The city is still under a curfew requiring people to be off the streets by 22:00 (02:00 GMT).

The swaggering idiot returns: George W. Bush emerges from artistic exile to rehab his disastrous legacy

George W. Bush is back, and he’s concerned that the foreign policy catastrophes he helped create aren’t being fixed

April 27, 2015

by Simon Maloy

Salon

Arguably the best thing George W. Bush ever did for his party was to keep quiet in the years following his presidency. Winning elections in a political environment shaped by Bush’s legacy – a bloody and unpopular conflict in Iraq and a cratering economy – was difficult enough. The last thing Republicans needed was W. out in the public eye smirking and drawling about staying the course. So he exiled himself to the ranch in Crawford and took up painting.

But Bush’s political hermit act couldn’t last forever. His brother’s likely entrance into the 2016 presidential race guaranteed that we’d hear from him sooner rather than later, and it’s only natural that after years of self-imposed silence, Bush would feel the urge to get out there and talk politics again. And so this past weekend, Bush spoke to a Republican donor conference in Las Vegas about the Middle East and served up some harsh critiques of his successor’s foreign policy. It was classic Bush, in that he seemingly refused to consider for even a moment that much of what we’re dealing with in the Middle East are the unintended consequences of his own epic policy failures.

According to a transcript of Bush’s remarks provided to Bloomberg’s Josh Rogin, Bush came down hard on Barack Obama for ruining all the good work he and his administration had done in Iraq:

Bush then went into a detailed criticism of Obama’s policies in fighting the Islamic State and dealing with the chaos in Iraq. On Obama’s decision to withdraw all U.S. troops in Iraq at the end of 2011, he quoted Senator Lindsey Graham calling it a “strategic blunder.” Bush signed an agreement with the Iraqi government to withdraw those troops, but the idea had been to negotiate a new status of forces agreement to keep U.S. forces there past 2011. The Obama administration tried and failed to negotiate such an agreement.

It was a “strategic blunder,” according to Bush, because he’d made everything right in Iraq with the surge, which he offered up as a great example of commander-in-chiefing: “When the plan wasn’t working in Iraq,” Bush said, “we changed.”

That’s a sanitized retelling of how the surge came about. The “plan” in Iraq had not been working for years, as evidenced by the ever-rising death tolls of American troops and Iraqi civilians. But Bush, as you might recall, was something of a stubborn man, and he stuck with the “plan,” insisting all along that it was working, even as the country fell apart before our eyes. Also, anyone who questioned the “plan” was immediately slimed by Bush, Karl Rove, and/or Dick Cheney as a traitorous, terrorist-appeasing, cut-and-run coward. The surge happened in 2007, four years after the war had begun and shortly after the political damage wrought by “staying the course” had cost the Republicans control of Congress in 2006.

And the surge itself failed to accomplish its primary goal of enabling political reconciliation amongst the factions within the Iraqi government. The regime the

Bush administration left in Iraq was hopelessly corrupt and presided over by a wannabe authoritarian strongman who repressed Iraqi Sunnis to consolidate his own power. But according to Bush, forcing the Iraqis to agree to a residual force of a couple of thousand U.S. troops would have kept the sectarian government in line and kept a lid on the violence – a fanciful notion that was contradicted by the entire history of the Iraq war up to that point.

Bush also had a few words on the bad hombres of the Islamic State:

Bush said he views the rise of the Islamic State as al-Qaeda’s “second act” and that they may have changed the name but that murdering innocents is still the favored tactic. He defended his own administration’s handling of terrorism, noting that the terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who confessed to killing Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, was captured on his watch: “Just remember the guy who slit Danny Pearl’s throat is in Gitmo, and now they’re doing it on TV.”

The Islamic State and Al Qaeda are actually two distinct entities who don’t like each other all that much, but if we must go by this dodgy framework, then the Islamic State is actually Al Qaeda’s third act. The first act was just plain old Al Qaeda. The second act was Al Qaeda in Iraq, which didn’t exist until George W. Bush invaded Iraq and gave regular Al Qaeda the chance to set up a new franchise. The Islamic State grew out of Al Qaeda in Iraq, and the group’s sophistication owes much to the fact that the Bush administration disbanded Saddam Hussein’s army and made freelancers out of Hussein’s intelligence officers, who took their talents to the various jihadist movements.

Anyway, one could go on and on in this vein. It’s silly to think that Bush would ever cop to the enduring failures of his disastrous Iraq adventure, but he at least had the good sense to keep his mouth shut. Now he’s out there defending the Bush record and letting it be known that he’s very concerned about how all the catastrophes he helped author are playing out.

Antarctica’s sinister Blood Falls could be a sign of life on Mars

April 29, 2015

RT

Antarctica’s Blood Falls could be home to microorganisms similar to alien life on Mars. New data shows that beneath McMurdo Dry Valleys, earth’s coldest and driest place, lies salty water that may support previously unknown ecosystems.

This region is best known for the eerie Blood Falls, an outflow of an iron oxide-tainted plume of saltwater. Scientists previously thought that red algae gave this bloody ooze its dramatic color, but later it was proven to be due only to iron oxides.

Scientists have discovered that brines (salt solutions) form extensive aquifers below glaciers, lakes and within permanently frozen soil. According to the National Science Foundation (NSF), the brines may also play a major role in modern biological processes in the Dry Valleys, named so because of their extremely low humidity as well as lack of snow or ice cover.

“These unfrozen materials appear to be relics of past surface ecosystems and our findings provide compelling evidence that they now provide deep subsurface habitats for microbial life despite extreme environmental conditions,” the study’s lead author, Jill Mikucki, an assistant professor of microbiology at the University of Tennessee, was quoted as saying.

It’s hoped that the new data might shed light on whether similar conditions exist elsewhere in the solar system. The Dry valleys ecosystem – home only to microscopic animal and plant life – closely resembles, during the Antarctic summer, conditions on the surface of Mars.

“Over billions of years of evolution, microbes seem to have adapted to conditions in almost all surface and near-surface environments on Earth. Tiny pore spaces filled with hyper-saline brine staying liquid down to -15 Celsius may pose one of the greatest challenges to microbes,” a glaciologist and coauthor at the University of California, Slawek Tulaczyk, said.

According to Tulaczyk, the electromagnetic data gathered by researchers indicates that “margins of Antarctica may shelter a vast microbial habitat, in which limits of life are tested by difficult physical and chemical conditions.”

The team also found evidence that brines flow towards the Antarctic coast from roughly 18 kilometers inland, eventually discharging into the Southern Ocean, a biologically rich body of water that encircles Antarctica.

Researchers managed to gather their groundbreaking data using a novel, helicopter-borne electromagnetic sensor, developed in Denmark, to penetrate the surface of large swathes of terrain. The project took many years of developing the best mapping technology in the world. The results shed new light on the history and evolution of the Dry Valley landscape, which during the height of the southern summer has free flowing rivers and streams.

The research was published in the journal Nature Communications.

Encrypting Your Laptop Like You Mean It

April 27, 2015

by Micah Lee

The Intercept

Time and again, people are told there is one obvious way to mitigate privacy threats of all sorts, from mass government surveillance to pervasive online tracking to cybercriminals: Encryption. As President Obama put it earlier this year, speaking in between his administration’s attacks on encryption, “There’s no scenario in which we don’t want really strong encryption.” Even after helping expose all the ways the government can get its hands on your data, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden still maintained, “Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on.”

But how can ordinary people get started using encryption? Encryption comes in many forms and is used at many different stages in the handling of digital information (you’re using it right now, perhaps without even realizing it, because your connection to this website is encrypted). When you’re trying to protect your privacy, it’s totally unclear how, exactly, to start using encryption. One obvious place to start, where the privacy benefits are high and the technical learning curve is low, is something called full disk encryption. Full disk encryption not only provides the type of strong encryption Snowden and Obama reference, but it’s built-in to all major operating systems, it’s the only way to protect your data in case your laptop gets lost or stolen, and it takes minimal effort to get started and use.

If you want to encrypt your hard disk and have it truly help protect your data, you shouldn’t just flip it on; you should know the basics of what disk encryption protects, what it doesn’t protect, and how to avoid common mistakes that could let an attacker easily bypass your encryption.

If you’re in a hurry, go ahead and skip to the bottom, where I explain, step-by-step, how to encrypt your disk for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Then, when you have time, come back and read the important caveats preceding those instructions.

What disk encryption guards againstIf someone gets physical access to your computer and you aren’t using disk encryption, they can very easily steal all of your files.

It doesn’t matter if you have a good password because the attacker can simply boot to a new operating system off of a USB stick, bypassing your password, to look at your files. Or they can remove your hard disk and put it in a different computer to gain access. All they need is a screwdriver, a second computer, and a $10 USB enclosure.

Computers have become an extension of our lives and private information continually piles up on our hard disks. Your computer probably contains work documents, photos and videos, password databases, web browser histories, and other scattered bits of information that doesn’t belong to anyone but you. Everyone should be running full-disk encryption on their laptops.

Encrypting your disk will protect you and your data in case your laptop falls into the wrong hands, whether because you accidentally left it somewhere, because your home or office was burglarized, or because it was seized by government agents at home or abroad.

It’s worth noting that no one has privacy rights when crossing borders. Even if you’re a U.S. citizen entering the United States, your Constitutional rights do not apply at the border, and border agents reserve the right to copy all of the files off of your computer or phone if they choose to. This is also true in Canada, and in other countries around the world. If you plan on traveling with electronic devices, disk encryption is the only way you have a chance at protecting your data if border agents insist on searching you. In some situations it might be in your best interest to cooperate and unlock your device, but in others it might not. Without disk encryption, the choice is made for you: the border agents get all your data.

What disk encryption is useless against

There’s a common misconception that encrypting your hard disk makes your computer secure, but this isn’t entirely true. In fact, disk encryption is only useful against attackers that have physical access to your computer. It doesn’t make your computer any harder to attack over a network.

All of the common ways people get hacked still apply. Attackers can still trick you into installing malware. You can still visit malicious websites that exploit bugs in Flash, or in your web browser, or in your operating system’s font or image rendering engines, or countless other ways. When you visit benevolent websites, network attackers can still secretly make them malicious by modifying them in transit. Attackers can still exploit services running on your computer, such as network file sharing, iTunes playlist sharing, or your BitTorrent client, to name a few.

And of course, disk encryption doesn’t do anything to stop internet surveillance. Spy agencies like NSA, who tap into the fiber optic cables that make up the backbone of the internet, will still be able to spy on nearly everything you do online. An entirely different category of encryption is needed to fix that systemic problem.

The different ways you can get hacked or surveilled are too numerous to list in full. In future posts I’ll explain how to reduce the size of your probably-vast attack surface. But for now it’s important to know that disk encryption only protects against a single flavor of attack: physical access.

How it works

The goal of disk encryption is to make it so that if someone who isn’t you has access to your computer they won’t be able to access any of your files, but instead will only see scrambled, useless ciphertext.

Most disk encryption works like this. When you first power your computer on, before your operating system can even boot up, you must unlock your disk by supplying the correct encryption key. The files that make up your operating system are on your encrypted disk, after all, so there’s no way for your computer to work with them until the disk is unlocked.

In most cases, typing your passphrase doesn’t unlock the whole disk, it unlocks an encryption key, which in turn unlocks everything on the disk. This indirection allows you to change your passphrase without having to re-encrypt your disk with a new key, and also makes it possible to have multiple passphrases that can unlock the disk, for example if you add another user account to your laptop.

This means that your disk encryption passphrase is potentially one of the weakest security links. If your passphrase is “letmein”, a competent attacker will get past your disk encryption immediately. But if you use a properly generated high-entropy passphrase like “runge wall brave punch tick zesty pier”, it’s likely that no attacker, not even the NSA or Chinese intelligence, will ever be able to guess it.

You have to be extremely careful with strong disk encryption that can only be unlocked with a passphrase you’ve memorized. If you forget the passphrase, you get locked out of your own computer, losing your data forever. No data recovery service can help you, and if you give your machine to the FBI they won’t be able to access your files either. Because that’s kind of the point of disk encryption.

Once your computer is on and you’ve entered your passphrase, your disk encryption is completely transparent to you and to the applications on your computer. Files open and close as they normally would, and programs work just as they would on an unencrypted machine. You won’t notice any performance impact.

This means, however, that when your computer is powered on and unlocked, whomever is sitting at it has access to all your files and data, unencumbered by encryption. So if you want your disk encryption to work to its full potential, you need to lock your screen when your computer is going to be on while you’re away, and, for those times when you forget to lock it, to set it to lock automatically after, say, 10 minutes of idling.

It’s also important that you don’t have any other users on your system that have weak passwords or no passwords, and that you disable the guest account. If someone grabs your laptop, you don’t want them to be able to login at all.

Attacks against disk encryption

There are a few attacks against disk encryption that are tricky to defend against. Here are some precautions you can take.

Power off your computer completely (don’t just suspend it) when you think it’s at risk of falling into someone else’s hands, like right before going through customs when entering a new country. This defends against memory-based attacks.

Computers have temporary storage called RAM (otherwise known as memory) which you can think of as scratch paper for all of your software. When your computer is powered on, your software is constantly writing to and deleting from parts of your RAM. If you use disk encryption, as soon as you successfully unlock your encrypted disk the encryption key is stored in RAM until you power your computer off. It needs to be—otherwise there would be no way to encrypt and decrypt files on the fly as you use your computer.

But unfortunately, laptops have ports that have direct memory access, or DMA, including FireWire, USB, and others. If an attacker has access to your computer and your disk is unlocked (this is true even if your laptop is suspended), they can simply plug a malicious device into your computer to be able to manipulate your RAM. This could include directly reading your encryption keys or injecting commands into your operating system, such as closing the screen lock program. There is open source software called Inception that does just this using a FireWire cable and a second laptop, and there’s plenty of commercial hardware available too, like this one, or this one. It’s worth noting that new versions of Mac OS X uses a cool virtualization technology called VT-d to thwart this type of DMA attack.

But there are other ways for an attacker to learn what’s in your RAM. When you power your computer off, everything in RAM fades into nothingness. But this doesn’t happen immediately; it takes a few minutes, and an attacker can make it take even longer by physically freezing the RAM. An attacker with physical access to your powered-on computer can use a screwdriver to open the case of your computer and then use an upside-down can of compressed air to freeze your RAM (as in the image above). Then they can quickly cut the power to your computer, unplug your RAM, plug the RAM into a different computer, and dump all of the data from RAM to a disk. By sifting through that data, they can find a copy of your encryption key, which can then be used to decrypt all of the files on your hard disk. This is called the cold boot attack, and you can see a video of it in action here.

The key takeaway is that while your encrypted disk is unlocked, disk encryption doesn’t fully protect your data. Because of this, you may consider closing all your work and completely shutting down your computer at the end of the day rather than just suspending it.

It’s also important to make sure your laptop is always physically secure so that only people you trust ever have access to it. You should consider carrying your laptop with you wherever you go, as inconvenient as that may be, if your data is extremely important to you. When traveling, bring it with you in a carry-on bag instead of checking it in your luggage, and carry it with you rather than leaving it in a hotel room. Keep it with a trusted friend or locked in a safe when you can’t babysit it yourself.

This is all to defend against a different type of disk encryption attack known, in somewhat archaic language, as the “evil maid” attack. People often leave their laptops in their hotel room while traveling, and all it takes is one hotel housekeeper/elite hacker to foil your disk encryption.

Even when you use full disk encryption you normally don’t encrypt 100% of your disk. There’s a tiny part of it that remains in plaintext. The program that runs as soon as you power on your computer, that asks you to type in your passphrase and unlocks your encrypted disk, isn’t encrypted itself. An attacker with physical access to your computer could modify that program on the tiny part of your disk that isn’t encrypted to secretly do something malicious, like wait for you to type your passphrase and then install malware in your operating system as soon as you successfully unlock the disk.

Microsoft BitLocker does some cool tricks to make software-based evil maid attacks considerably harder by storing your encryption key in a special tamper-resistant chip in your computer called a Trusted Platform Module, or TPM. It’s designed to only release your encryption key after confirming that your bootloader hasn’t been modified to be malicious, thwarting evil maid attacks. Of course, there are other attacks against TPMs. Last month The Intercept published a document about the CIA’s research into stealing keys from TPMs, with the explicit aim of attacking BitLocker. They have successfully done it, both by monitoring electricity usage of a computer while the TPM is being used and by “measuring electromagnetic signals emanating from the TPM while it remains on the motherboard.”

You can set up your Linux laptop to always boot off of a USB stick that you carry around with you, which also mitigates against evil maid attacks (in this case, 100% of your disk actually is encrypted, and you carry the tiny unencrypted part around with you). But attackers with temporary access to your laptop can do more than modify your boot code. They could install a hardware keylogger, for example, that you would have no way of knowing is in your computer.

The important thing about evil maid attacks is that they work by tampering with a computer without the owner’s knowledge, but they still rely on the legitimate user to unlock the encrypted disk. If someone steals your laptop they can’t do an evil maid attack against you. Rather than stealing it, the attacker needs to secretly tamper with it and return it to you without raising your suspicions.

You can try using bleeding-edge tamper-evidence technology such as glitter nail polish to detect if someone has tampered with your computer. This is quite difficult to do in practice. If you have reason to believe that someone might have maliciously tampered with your computer, don’t type your passphrase into it.

Defending against these attacks might sound intimidating, but the good news is that most people don’t need to worry about it. It all depends on your threat model, which basically is an assessment of your situation to determine how paranoid you really need to be. Only the most high-risk users need to worry about memory-dumping or evil maid attacks. The rest of you can simply turn on disk encryption and forget about it.

What about TrueCrypt?

TrueCrypt is popular disk encryption software used by millions of people. In May of 2014, the security community went into shock when the software’s anonymous developers shut down the project, replacing the homepage with a warning that, “Using TrueCrypt is not secure as it may contain unfixed security issues.”

TrueCrypt recently underwent a thorough security audit showing that it doesn’t have any backdoors or major security issues. Despite this, I don’t recommend that people use TrueCrypt simply because it isn’t maintained anymore. As soon as a security bug is discovered in TrueCrypt (all software contains bugs), it will never get fixed. You’re safer using actively developed encryption software.

How to encrypt your disk in Windows

BitLocker, which is Microsoft’s disk encryption technology, is only included in the Ultimate, Enterprise, and Pro versions of Windows Vista, 7, 8, and 8.1, but not the Home version which is what often comes pre-installed on Windows laptops. To see if BitLocker is supported on your version of Windows, open up Windows Explorer, right-click on C drive, and see if you have a “Turn on BitLocker” option (if you see a “Manage BitLocker” option, then congratulations, your disk is already encrypted, though you may want to finish reading this section anyway).

If BitLocker isn’t supported in your version of Windows, you can choose to upgrade to a version of Windows that is supported by buying a license (open Control Panel, System and Security, System, and click “Get more features with a new edition of Windows”). You can also choose to use different full disk encryption software, such as the open source program DiskCryptor.

BitLocker is designed to be used with a Trusted Platform Module (TPM), a tamper-resistent chip that is built into new PCs that can store your disk encryption key. Because BitLocker keys are stored in the TPM, by default it doesn’t require users to enter a passphrase when booting up. If your computer doesn’t have a TPM (BitLocker will tell you as soon as you try enabling it), it’s possible to use BitLocker without a TPM and to use a passphrase or USB stick instead.

If you only rely on your TPM to protect your encryption key, your disk will get automatically unlocked just by powering on the computer. This means an attacker who steals your computer while it’s fully powered off can simply power it on in order to do a DMA or cold boot attack to extract the key. If you want your disk encryption to be much more secure, in addition to using your TPM you should also set a PIN to unlock your disk or require inserting a USB stick on boot. This is more complicated, but worth it for the extra security.

Whenever you’re ready, try enabling BitLocker on your hard disk by right-clicking on C drive and choosing the “Turn on BitLocker” option. First you’ll be prompted to make a backup of your recovery key, which can be used to unlock your disk in case you ever get locked out.

I recommend that you don’t save a copy of your recovery key to your Microsoft account. If you do, Microsoft—and by extension anyone Microsoft is compelled to share data with, such as law enforcement or intelligence agencies, or anyone that hacks into Microsoft’s servers and can steal their data—will have the ability to unlock your encrypted disk. Instead, you should save your recovery key to a file on another drive or print it. The recovery key can unlock your disk, so it’s important that it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.

Follow the rest of the simple instructions and reboot your computer. When it boots up again, your disk will begin encrypting. You can continue to work on your computer while it’s encrypting in the background.

Once your disk is done encrypting, the next step is to set a PIN. This requires tweaking some internal Windows settings, but it shouldn’t be too hard if you follow the instructions to the dot.

Click Start and type “gpedit.msc” and press enter to open the Local Group Policy Editor. In the pane to the left, navigate to Local Computer Policy > Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > BitLocker Drive Encryption > Operating System Drives.

In the pane to the right, double-click on “Require additional authentication at startup.” Change it from “Not Configured” to “Enabled”, and click OK. You can close the Local Group Policy Editor.

Now open Windows Explorer, right-click on drive C, and click “Manage BitLocker”.

In the BitLocker Drive Encryption page, click “Change how drive is unlocked at startup”. Now you can choose to either require a PIN while starting up, or requiring that you insert a USB flash drive. Both work well, but I suggest you use a PIN because it’s something that you memorize. So if you get detained while crossing a border, for example, you can choose not to type your PIN to unlock your drive, however you can’t help it if border agents confiscate your USB flash drive and use that to boot your computer.

If you choose to require a PIN, it must be between 4 and 20 numbers long. The longer you make it the more secure it is, but make sure you choose one that you can memorize. It’s best if you pick this PIN entirely at random rather than basing it on something in your life, so avoid easily guessable PINs like birthdates of loved ones or phone numbers. Whatever you choose make sure you don’t forget it, because otherwise you’ll be locked out of your computer. After entering your PIN twice, click Set PIN.

Now reboot your computer. Before Windows starts booting this time, you should be promped to type your PIN.

Finally, open User Accounts to see all of the users on your computer, confirm that they all have passwords set and change them to be stronger if necessary. Disable the guest account if it’s enabled.

How to encrypt your disk in Mac OS X

FileVault, Apple’s disk encryption technology for Macs, is simple to enable. Open System Preferences, click on the Security & Privacy icon, and switch to the FileVault tab. If you see a button that says “Turn Off FileVault…”, then congratulations, your disk is already encrypted. Otherwise, click the lock icon in the bottom left so you can make changes, and click “Turn On FileVault…”.

Next you will be asked if you want to store a copy of your disk encryption recovery key in your iCloud account.

I recommend that you don’t allow your iCloud account to unlock your disk. If you do, Apple — and by extension anyone Apple is compelled to share data with, such as law enforcement or intelligence agencies, or anyone that hacks into Apple’s servers and can steal their data — will have the ability to unlock your encrypted disk. If you do store your recovery key in your iCloud account, Apple encrypts it using your answers to a series of secret questions as an encryption key itself, offering little real security.

Instead, choose “Create a recovery key and do not use my iCloud account” and click Continue. The next window will show you your recovery key, which is twenty-four random letters and numbers. You can write this down if you wish. The recovery key can unlock your disk, so it’s important that it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.

Once you click Continue you will be prompted to reboot your computer. After rebooting, FileVault will begin encrypting your hard disk. You can continue to work on your computer while it’s encrypting in the background.

With FileVault, Mac OS X user passwords double as passphrases to unlock your encrypted disk. If you want your passphrase to survive guessing attempts by even the most well-funded spy agencies in the world, you should follow the instructions here to generate a high-entropy passphrase to use to login to your Mac.

Go back to System Preferences and this time click on the Users & Groups icon. From there you should disable the guest account, remove any users that you don’t use, and update any weak passwords to be strong passphrases.

How to encrypt your disk in Linux

Unlike in Windows and Mac OS X, you can only encrypt your disk when you first install Linux. If you already have Linux installed without disk encryption, you’re going to need to backup your data and reinstall Linux. While there’s a huge variety of Linux distributions, I’m going to use Ubuntu as an example, but setting up disk encryption in all major distributions is similar.

Start by booting to your Ubuntu DVD or USB stick and follow the simple instructions to install Ubuntu. When you get to the “Installation type” page, check the box “Encrypt the new Ubuntu installation for security,” and then click Install Now.

On the next page, “Choose a security key,” you must type your encryption passphrase. You’ll have to type this each time you power on your computer to unlock your encrypted disk. If you want your passphrase to survive guessing attempts by even the most well-funded spy agencies in the world, you should follow the instructions here.

Then click Install Now, and follow the rest of the instructions until you get to the “Who are you?” page. Make sure to choose a strong password—if someone steals your laptop while it’s suspended, this password is all that comes between the attacker and your data. And make sure that “Require my password to log in” is checked, and that “Log in automatically” is not checked. There is no reason to check “Encrypt my home folder” here, because you’re already encrypting your entire disk.

And that’s it.

Correction: This post originally gave an incorrect date for when the TrueCrypt project was shut down. April 27 12:35 pm ET.

Israel struck Gaza shelters – UN report

April 27, 2015

BBC News

At least 44 Palestinians were killed by “Israeli actions” while sheltering at seven UN schools during last summer’s war in Gaza, a UN inquiry has found.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said he deplored the deaths and stressed that UN facilities were “inviolable”.

The inquiry also found that three empty UN schools were used by Palestinian militants to store weapons, and that in two cases they likely fired from them.

The 50-day conflict claimed the lives of more than 2,260 people.

At least 2,189 were Palestinians, including more than 1,486 civilians, according to the UN. On the Israeli side, 67 soldiers were killed along with six civilians.

Utmost gravity’

In November, Mr Ban announced that an independent board of inquiry would look into 10 incidents at schools run by the UN agency for Palestine refugees, Unrwa, between 8 July and 26 August 2014.

Both Israel and Hamas, the militant group that dominates Gaza, said they would co-operate with the probe headed by the retired Dutch general Patrick Cammaert.

At least 227 Palestinians sheltering at UN facilities were injured as a result of Israeli actions

Although the board of inquiry’s full 207-page report will remain private, the UN released a summary of its findings on Monday.

In one incident, a girls’ school was hit by 88 mortar rounds fired by the Israeli military, the summary said. Another girls’ school was struck by an anti-tank projectile, while a third was hit by a missile.

At a fourth girls’ school, the inquiry found, “no prior warning had been given by the government of Israel of the firing of 155mm high explosive projectiles on, or in the surrounding area of the school”.

“It is a matter of the utmost gravity that those who looked to them for protection and who sought and were granted shelter there had their hopes and trust denied,” Mr Ban wrote in a cover letter accompanying the summary.

He also expressed dismay that Palestinian militant groups would put UN schools at risk by using them to hide arms.

The inquiry found no warning was given before 155mm projectiles were fired towards one school

The report found that weapons were stored at three schools, although they were not being used as shelters at the time. The inquiry found that Palestinian militants had probably fired from two schools, which Mr Ban said was “unacceptable”.

“United Nations premises are inviolable and should be places of safety, particularly in a situation of armed conflict,” he warned. “I will work with all concerned and spare no effort to ensure that such incidents will never be repeated.”

A spokesman for the Israeli foreign ministry, Emmanuel Nahshon, said in response: “All of the incidents attributed by the report to Israel have already been subject to thorough examinations, and criminal investigations have been launched where relevant.”

“Israel makes every effort to avoid harm to sensitive sites, in the face of terrorist groups who are committed not only to targeting Israeli civilians but also to using Palestinian civilians and UN facilities as shields for their terrorist activities.”

There was no immediate comment from Hamas or the Palestinian Authority.

Experts had long warned that Nepal was ripe for disaster

April 27, 2015

by Joel Achenbach

The Washington Post

A massive block of Earth’s crust, roughly 75 miles long and 37 miles wide, lurched 10 feet to the south Saturday over the course of 30 seconds. Riding atop this block of the planet was the capital of Nepal — Kathmandu — and millions of Nepalese.

That’s the description of Saturday’s earthquake from University of Colorado geologist Roger Bilham, a world-renowned expert on Himalayan earthquakes. The 7.8-magnitude earthquake that flattened historic buildings in Kathmandu and has taken more than a thousand lives is the latest release of built-up strain from the collision of two of Earth’s tectonic plates.

The Indian plate is inexorably sliding, in a halting, ground-shaking fashion, northward, beneath the much larger Eurasian plate. The process has created the lofty Tibetan plateau and pushed up mountains that reach nearly 30,000 feet above sea level. The Himalaya front can produce earthquakes that are much more powerful than the one on Saturday — such as the 8.2-magnitude earthquake that hit Nepal in 1934.

But this one was relatively shallow, which intensifies the surface shaking, and its epicenter was closer to Kathmandu than the 1934 temblor.

“The earthquake ruptured under the city, very close to the city, so this is as bad as our worst-case scenario, probably,” Bilham said.

As news reports filtered in, experts predicted the death toll will mount steadily.

“I expect that there’s devastation scattered all around Nepal that we’re not even glimpsing at this point,” said Susan Hough, a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey who has made multiple trips to Nepal.

The news bulletin of the massive quake hit Hough and colleagues hard. Theirs can be a frustrating profession, because they know there are natural disasters and humanitarian crises about to happen somewhere — but they can’t predict precisely where and when. This one, however, had been long anticipated.

For years now, experts on seismic hazard have kept a list of cities most vulnerable to a catastrophic earthquake. Kathmandu has always been high on that list.

Geology, urbanization, architecture and building codes have increased the vulnerability of the Nepalese, experts say, and the only major unknown has been the timing of the disaster.

“We knew it was going to happen. We saw it in ’34,” Hough said. “The earthquakes we expect to happen do happen.”

Scientists, engineers and government officials have worked in recent years on retrofitting schools and hospitals to make them sturdier in a temblor. But at the same time, civil unrest has pushed more people into urban areas, where they inhabit newly constructed, unreinforced-masonry buildings that in many cases are not designed to withstand the strong motion of a quake.

Another problem: Buildings often have what engineers call a “soft first story,” because merchants want open spaces to sell their wares and there are fewer sturdy walls to limit the shaking in an earthquake.

“It was clearly a disaster in the making that was getting worse faster than anyone was able to make it better,” Hough said. “You’re up against a Himalayan-scale problem with Third World resources.”

Bilham agreed: “The message has not been ignored, it’s just that the scope of the reconstruction required to strengthen all the buildings in Kathmandu is so enormous.”

The orthodoxy among seismologists is that earthquakes don’t kill people; buildings kill people.

The challenge of improving building codes has become all the more urgent in an era when urbanization is surging in many parts of the world, including in the Kathmandu Valley.

“It seems that the rural-to-urban migration of people has resulted in really rapid construction of housing which, as far as I can see from my visits, has been unregulated and is just very, very vulnerable,” said Brian Tucker, founder and president of GeoHazards International, a nonprofit devoted to reducing casualties from natural disasters.

On Saturday, he recalled a conversation in the late 1990s with a Nepalese government minister who told him, “We don’t have to worry about earthquakes anymore, because we already had an earthquake.” That was a reference to the 1934 quake.

“I took him to the window and had him look out and said, ‘As long as you see those Himalaya Mountains there, you will know that you will continue to have earthquakes,’” Tucker said.

Nepal quake ‘followed historic pattern’

April 27, 2015

by Kate Ravilious Science writer

BBC News

Nepal’s devastating magnitude-7.8 earthquake on Saturday was primed over 80 years ago by its last massive earthquake in 1934, which razed around a quarter of Kathmandu to the ground and killed over 17,000 people.

This latest quake follows the same pattern as a duo of big tremors that occurred over 700 years ago, and results from a domino effect of strain transferring along the fault, geologists say.

The researchers discovered the likely existence of this doublet effect only in recent weeks, during field work in the region.

Saturday’s quake, which struck an area in central Nepal, between the capital Kathmandu and the city of Pokhara, has had a far-reaching impact.

More than 4,000 people have lost their lives, with victims in Bangladesh, India, Tibet, and on Mount Everest, where avalanches were triggered.

Death tolls and casualty figures are likely to rise over the coming days, and the risk of landslides on slopes made unstable by the quake mean that the danger is far from passed.

Trench investigations

In a sadly prescient turn of events, Laurent Bollinger, from the CEA research agency in France, and his colleagues, uncovered the historical pattern of earthquakes during fieldwork in Nepal last month, and anticipated a major earthquake in exactly the location where Saturday’s big tremor has taken place.

Down in the jungle in central southern Nepal, Bollinger’s team dug trenches across the country’s main earthquake fault (which runs for more than 1,000km from west to east), at the place where the fault meets the surface, and used fragments of charcoal buried within the fault to carbon-date when the fault had last moved.

Ancient texts mention a number of major earthquakes, but locating them on the ground is notoriously difficult.

Monsoon rains wash soils down the hillsides and dense jungle covers much of the land, quickly obscuring earthquake ruptures.

Bollinger’s group was able to show that this segment of fault had not moved for a long time.

“We showed that this fault was not responsible for the great earthquakes of 1505 and 1833, and that the last time it moved was most likely 1344,” says Bollinger, who presented his findings to the Nepal Geological Society two weeks ago.

Previously, the team had worked on the neighbouring segment of fault, which lies to the east of Kathmandu, and had shown that this segment experienced major quakes in 1255, and then more recently in 1934.

When Bollinger and his colleagues saw this historic pattern of events, they became greatly concerned.

“We could see that both Kathmandu and Pokhara would now be particularly exposed to earthquakes rupturing the main fault, where it likely last did in 1344, between the two cities,” explains Paul Tapponnier, from the Earth Observatory of Singapore, who was working with Bollinger.

When a large earthquake occurs, it is common for the movement to transfer strain further along the earthquake fault, and this seems to be what happened in 1255.

Over the following 89 years, strain accumulated in the neighbouring westerly segment of fault, finally rupturing in 1344.

Now, history has repeated itself, with the 1934 fault transferring strain westwards along the fault, which has finally been released today, 81 years later.

And, worryingly, the team warns there could be more to come.

“Early calculations suggest that Saturday’s magnitude-7.8 earthquake is probably not big enough to rupture all the way to the surface, so there is still likely to be more strain stored, and we should probably expect another big earthquake to the west and south of this one in the coming decades,” says Bollinger.

Five Disturbing Things You Didn’t Know About Forensic “Science”

April 25, 2015

by Jordan Smith

The Intercept

Last week, The Washington Post revealed that in 268 trials dating back to 1972, 26 out of 28 examiners within the FBI Laboratory’s microscopic hair comparison unit “overstated forensic matches in a way that favored prosecutors in more than 95 percent” of the cases. These included cases where 14 people have since been either executed or died in prison.

The hair analysis review — the largest-ever post-conviction review of questionable forensic evidence by the FBI — has been ongoing since 2012. The review is a joint effort by the FBI, Innocence Project and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. The preliminary results announced last week represent just a small percentage of the nearly 3,000 criminal cases in which the FBI hair examiners may have provided analysis. Of the 329 DNA exonerations to date, 74 involved flawed hair evidence analysis.

While these revelations are certainly disturbing — and the implications alarming — the reality is that they represent the tip of the iceberg when it comes to flawed forensics.

In a landmark 2009 report, the National Academy of Sciences concluded that, aside from DNA, there was little, if any, meaningful scientific underpinning to many of the forensic disciplines. “With the exception of nuclear DNA analysis … no forensic method has been rigorously shown to have the capacity to consistently, and with a high degree of certainty, demonstrate a connection between evidence and a specific individual or source,” reads the report.

There is one thing that all troubling forensic techniques have in common: They’re all based on the idea that patterns, or impressions, are unique and can be matched to the thing, or person, who made them. But the validity of this premise has not been subjected to rigorous scientific inquiry. “The forensic science community has had little opportunity to pursue or become proficient in the research that is needed to support what it does,” the NAS report said.

Nonetheless, courts routinely allow forensic practitioners to testify in front of jurors, anointing them “experts” in these pattern-matching fields — together dubbed forensic “sciences” despite the lack of evidence to support that — based only on their individual, practical experience. These witnesses, who are largely presented as learned and unbiased arbiters of truth, can hold great sway with jurors whose expectations are often that real life mimics the television crime lab or police procedural.

But that is not the case, as the first results from the FBI hair evidence review clearly show. And given the conclusions of the NAS report, future results are not likely to improve. What’s more, if other pattern-matching disciplines were subjected to the same scrutiny as hair analysis, there is no reason to think the results would be any better. For some disciplines the results could even be worse. Consider the examples below:

1. Bite-mark analysis is based on two falsehoods and has wrongfully convicted at least 24 people

“Hair comparison analysis is practically DNA compared to bite mark analysis,” says Chris Fabricant, director of strategic litigation for the Innocence Project. Bite-mark analysis — generally the practice of identifying alleged bite marks on human skin and then matching the pattern left behind to a person’s dentition — relies on two basic assumptions: One, that human dentition, like DNA, is unique; and two, that human skin is a good medium for transferring and preserving a bite-mark impression. But as it turns out, neither is true, according to research conducted by Mary Bush, a professor of dentistry at the State University of New York at Buffalo, who, with her team, has conducted the only actual scientific inquiries into the practice in decades.

Indeed, some of the harshest criticism contained in the NAS report focuses on bite-mark evidence, and concludes that there is no scientific underpinning to the discipline. In a recent four-part series on bite-mark analysis, The Washington Post’s Radley Balko described how forensic odontologists — dentists who profess expertise in bite-mark analysis (and who are qualified as such by the American Board of Forensic Odontology) not only reject the NAS’s conclusion, but actively attack anyone who dares to criticize the field. Two examples: In 2013, ABFO leadership orchestrated an aggressive — and ultimately unsuccessful — plan to expel their own colleague, Dr. Michael Bowers, from membership within the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, which would have hamstrung Bowers from testifying against the practice in court. His crime: being a vocal critic of bite-mark “science.” In 2014, speaking at an ABFO dinner, Manhattan prosecutor Melissa Mourges, a strident supporter of bite-mark evidence, not only derided Mary Bush’s work, but also peppered her remarks with petty insults about Bush’s physical appearance.

Of course, as it is with hair analysis — and, really, any of the questionable forensic disciplines critiqued by the NAS — the utter lack of a scientific foundation has done nothing to keep bite-mark evidence out of the courtroom. To date, DNA has exonerated 24 individuals sent to prison on bite-mark evidence.

2. Dexter lied to you about blood spatters. They sow chaos and confusion.

In the popular Showtime series Dexter, serial killer of serial killers Dexter Morgan has a day job with the Miami police, where he works as a blood-spatter analyst. The episodes show him expertly analyzing sprays of blood on walls or drops on floors, quickly — and reliably — arriving at a concrete theory of the crime that, more often than not, leads the PD’s homicide detectives to swift resolution.

If only it were that easy.

While there is some actual science involved in bloodstain-pattern analysis — knowledge of the physics of fluids is helpful, as is an understanding of the pathology of wounds — the sheer number of variables involved in the creation of any given bloodstain makes reaching any definitive conclusion about the circumstances of its origin difficult at best. “The uncertainties associated with bloodstain pattern analysis are enormous,” the NAS report concluded.

Yet for defendants, as with other forensic disciplines, the conclusions of a bloodstain “expert,” can mean the difference between living free or behind bars. The NAS report warns that while science supports “some aspects” of bloodstain-pattern analysis — whether blood “spattered quickly or slowly” for example — some experts “extrapolate far beyond what can be concluded.” This risk was powerfully demonstrated in the bizarre case of Warren Horinek, a former Fort Worth, Texas police officer who, based solely on the conclusions of a blood pattern expert, was convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison for the 1995 murder of his wife — a death that the police, medical examiner, and prosecutor all concluded was actually suicide.

Horinek remains in prison.

3. Worn shoes and tires can land you on death row, but there’s no evidence they’re unique

Among the most common pattern-matching evidence found at crime scenes are shoe prints and tire tracks. Although, generally speaking, soles and tire treads are decidedly not unique, since both are mass produced — 299 million tires were sold in the U.S. in 2013 alone — a combination of factors allegedly transform these common items into unique pieces of evidence for courtroom purposes. Uniqueness is derived from the degradation of these items from normal wear and tear, cuts, scrapes or other factors.

There are several problems with this type of evidence — not least of which is the fact that while the evidence found at a crime scene remains static, fixed in time, shoe and tire wear is continuous, meaning in part that unless you can immediately match a shoe or tire to a crime scene, the potential probative value of that evidence could quickly be irretrievably lost. But more concerning is that there is no science demonstrating that any particular marks are actually unique, nor are there any standards for how many unique characteristics it takes to declare a match between object and evidence. There is “no defined threshold that must be surpassed, nor are there any studies that associate the number of matching characteristics with the probability that the impressions were made by a common source,” reads the NAS report. “Experts in impression evidence will argue that they accumulate a sense of those probabilities through experience, which may be true. However it is difficult to avoid biases in experience-based judgments, especially in the absence of a feedback mechanism to correct an erroneous judgment.”

Indeed, spurious shoe print evidence offered by an FBI examiner helped to send Charles Irvin Fain to death row for the 1982 kidnapping, rape and murder of a 9-year-old girl in Idaho. According to the examiner, wear on Fain’s shoes matched wear patterns in shoe prints connected to the crime — and those wear patterns, the expert concluded, were created by a person with a particular gait. The perpetrator would “have to have the same characteristic walk as the individual who owned those shoes,” the expert testified.

DNA testing ultimately led to Fain’s release from prison in 2001 after spending 18 years on death row.

4. No two fingerprints are alike? That is the question

Perhaps no area of forensics is more familiar to people — or outside DNA, more believed to be infallible — than fingerprint examination. The practice has been around for more than a century, and its ubiquity and repetition, combined with the mere passage of time, has helped to cement fingerprint matching’s reputation. The problem is that this practice, too, is an entirely subjective endeavor — and it is only recently that there has been any serious scientific inquiry into its validity. “No two prints are alike,” experts will say, but there’s no actual proof that is true.

Importantly, fingerprints collected from crime scenes are often only partial prints, distorted, smudged, or generally “noisy,” as one group of investigators, seeking to formulate error rates for fingerprint examination, wrote last year. And that’s where problems can happen: Consider the case of Brandon Mayfield, the Oregon lawyer who was falsely accused of participation in the 2004 Madrid, Spain train bombings based on a fingerprint collected from a bag containing detonation devices. The FBI later admitted it bungled the print match.

Fortunately, there are ongoing efforts underway within the discipline’s community of experts to validate forensic fingerprint examinations. Jennifer Mnookin, a UCLA law professor and lead investigator into fingerprint error rates, says that leaders in the field have begun to embrace the emerging “research culture” that the area is taking on. “At this point it’s not that the work is done,” she says. “It isn’t. But compared to bite marks…to handwriting [analysis], there is now a growing body of research looking at these questions [of validity and reliability] in a way that didn’t exist 10 to 15 years ago.”

5. The FBI trained an army of local hair-analysis charlatans

Although it is certainly a good thing that the FBI agreed to undertake a review of the work of its hair examiners — and then to clearly and publicly declare the miserable results — there is a deeper and even more troubling truth about the hair analysis revelations: There are potentially tens of thousands of additional cases out there that will not necessarily ever be reviewed. That’s because the FBI examiners for 25 years provided training to hundreds of hair examiners across the country — training that included the demonstrably, scientifically-flawed language that has been exposed in the current, and ongoing FBI case review.

Whether all of the state cases will ever be identified let alone reviewed, remains to be seen.

For Timothy Bridges, the stakes couldn’t be much higher. Bridges was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for the beating and rape of an 83-year-old woman in Charlotte, NC, in the spring of 1989. The victim (who died of unrelated causes before Bridges trial), variously described her attacker and denied that she was raped. Ultimately, Bridges, who had wavy shoulder-length hair — which is how the victim once described her attacker — was charged with the crime. There was no DNA to connect Bridges to the crime and he was not a match for a bloody palm print found at the scene (that print was never matched to anyone). But there were two hairs collected that an FBI-trained examiner testified not only were “likely” Bridges, but also that there was a very low chance they could belong to anyone else: The “likelihood of two Caucasian individuals having indistinguishable head hair is very low,” expert Elinos Whitlock testified — the very sort of language unsupported by science and found in the faulty cases identified in the current FBI review.

Bridges appealed his conviction, arguing in part that there was no scientific basis to Whitlock’s testimony. In 1992, the state appeals court disagreed: “We find no reversible error,” the court ruled, concluding that testimony by a “properly qualified witness on hair identification” was admissible.

Bridges is currently seeking a new trial and the state is reportedly reviewing the matter.

]]>0adminhttp://www.tbrnews.org/?p=9842015-04-18T13:05:05Z2015-04-18T13:05:05ZThe Voice of the White House

Washington, D.C. April 17, 2015:”Massive, and growing, global overpopulation coupled with increasingly limited natural resources, like water, is producing massive die-offs among the Third World peoples. Drowning refugees in the Med, starvation and AIDS in Africa, the strong probability that some disease like smallpox will start up and decimate crowded cities and the rising sea levels throughout the world are the ingredients for major disasters.”

Thousands dead, few prosecuted

Among the thousands of fatal shootings at the hands of police since 2005, only 54 officers have been charged, a Post analysis found. Most were cleared or acquitted in the cases that have been resolved.

April 11, 2015

by Kimberly Kindy, Kimbriell Kelly

Washington Post

On a rainy night five years ago, Officer Coleman “Duke” Brackney set off in pursuit of a suspected drunk driver, chasing his black Mazda Miata down rural Arkansas roads at speeds of nearly 100 miles per hour. When the sports car finally came to rest in a ditch, Brackney opened fire at the rear window and repeatedly struck the driver, 41-year-old James Ahern, in the back. The gunshots killed Ahern.

Prosecutors charged Brackney with felony manslaughter. But he eventually entered a plea to a lesser charge and could ultimately be left with no criminal record.

Now, he serves as the police chief in a small community 20 miles from the scene of the shooting.

Brackney is among 54 officers charged over the past decade for fatally shooting someone while on duty, according to an analysis by The Washington Post and researchers at Bowling Green State University. This analysis, based on a wide range of public records and interviews with law enforcement, judicial and other legal experts, sought to identify for the first time every officer who faced charges­ for such shootings since 2005. These represent a small fraction of the thousands of fatal police shootings that have occurred across the country in that time.

In an overwhelming majority of the cases where an officer was charged, the person killed was unarmed. But it usually took more than that.

When prosecutors pressed charges, The Post analysis found, there were typically other factors that made the case exceptional, including: a victim shot in the back, a video recording of the incident, incriminating testimony from other officers or allegations of a coverup.

Forty-three cases involved at least one of these four factors. Nineteen cases involved at least two.

In the most recent incident, officials in North Charleston, S.C., filed a murder charge Tuesday against a white police officer, Michael T. Slager, for gunning down an apparently unarmed black man. A video recording showed Slager repeatedly shooting the man in the back as he was running away.

“To charge an officer in a fatal shooting, it takes something so egregious, so over the top that it cannot be explained in any rational way,” said Philip M. Stinson, a criminologist at Bowling Green who studies arrests of police. “It also has to be a case that prosecutors are willing to hang their reputation on.”

But even in these most extreme instances, the majority of the officers whose cases have been resolved have not been convicted, The Post analysis found.

And when they are convicted or plead guilty, they’ve tended to get little time behind bars, on average four years and sometimes only weeks. Jurors are very reluctant to punish police officers, tending to view them as guardians of order, according to prosecutors and defense lawyers.

The definition of “officers” used in the analysis extends beyond local police to all government law enforcement personnel who are armed, including sheriff’s deputies and corrections officers. The analysis included some shootings that officers described as accidental.

There is no accurate tally of all the cases­ of police shootings across the country, even deadly ones. The FBI maintains a national database of fatal shootings by officers but does not require police departments to keep it updated.Over the past year, a series of controversial police killings of unarmed victims — including Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., Tamir Rice in Cleveland and Eric Garner on Staten Island — has raised questions over what it takes for officers to face criminal ­charges. Often, the public is divided over whether the police went too far. Only in rare cases­ do prosecutors and grand juries decide that the killing cannot be justified.

Such cases include a Michigan state trooper who shot and killed an unarmed homeless man in Detroit as he was shuffling toward him, the man’s pants down past his knees. The incident was captured on video, and the officer, who said he thought the man had a gun, was charged with second-degree murder. A jury accepted the officer’s account and found him not guilty. He remains on the job.

They also include a police officer in Darlington County, S.C., who was charged with murder after he chased an unarmed man wanted for stealing a gas grill and three U-Haul trailers into the woods, shooting him in the back four times. A jury, believing that he feared for his life, found him not guilty.

Two Atlanta plainclothes officers opened fire and killed a 92-year-old woman during a mistaken drug raid on her home. As they pried the bars off her front door, she fired a single warning shot with an old revolver. The police responded by smashing the door down and shooting at her 39 times. One of the officers tried to disguise their error by planting bags of marijuana in her basement. The two officers pleaded guilty and received unusually stiff sentences of six and 10 years in a federal prison.

A rap musician, Killer Mike, wrote a song to memorialize the death of this African American grandmother at the hands of white officers, comparing her killing to “the dream of King when the sniper took his life.”

After the death of Michael Brown last summer, concerns about racism in policing have exploded in public debate, in particular whether white officers use excessive force when dealing with minorities and whether the criminal justice system protects the victims’ rights.

Among the officers charged since 2005 for fatal shootings, more than three-quarters were white. Two-thirds of their victims were minorities, all but two of them black.

Nearly all other cases­ involved black officers who killed black victims. In one other instance, a Latino officer fatally shot a white person and in another an Asian officer killed a black person. There were a total of 49 victims.

Identifying the exact role of race in fatal shootings and prosecutions is difficult. Often, prosecutors pursued charges against a backdrop of protests accusing police of racism. Race was also a factor in court when federal prosecutors stepped in and filed charges­ against officers for allegedly violating the victims’ civil rights. Six officers, all white, faced federal civil rights charges for killing blacks.

In interviews with more than 20 prosecutors across the country, they said that race did not factor into their decisions to bring charges against officers. The prosecutors said they pursued cases­ based on the legal merits.

But defense lawyer Doug Friesen, who represented a white officer convicted in 2013 for fatally shooting an unarmed black man, said that “it would be naive” for prosecutors to say race isn’t a consideration.

“Anytime you have politicians that have to make charging decisions, realistically that is part of their decision-making process,” Friesen said. “They are asking themselves, ‘Is there going to be rioting out in the streets?’ ”

Both Officer Coleman “Duke” Brackney and his victim James Ahern, shot dead in his Miata, were white.

Brackney, 32, recalled in an interview that he believed Ahern was about to back his car up andrun over him. The engine was racing and the backup lights flashed, Brackney said.

A video, captured by a camera mounted on his cruiser’s dashboard, indicated that the sports car was not not moving when the officer opened fire. The existence of that video was the key reason why prosecutors decided to bring charges, they said.

“In my mind, it was the third time he tried to run me over,” Brackney said in an interview with The Post. “His right hand came up in this sweeping motion, and I thought he was going for a gun. I don’t know what a jury would have believed — and that’s the problem. There was this risk, so entering a plea, I viewed it as a business decision.”

After pleading to a reduced charge of negligent homicide, a misdemeanor, Brackney served 30 days in jail as part of a plea agreement. The judge deferred the conviction, and if Brackney fulfills the terms of his probation, the case will be dismissed.

“No one wants to take a life, but at the end of the day, I realize that I’m the one who got to go home,” he said, adding, “I wouldn’t change what I did.”

He was fired by the Bella Vista Police Department, where he worked at the time, but was given another chance by the city of Sulphur Springs, Ark. Two years ago, city officials hired him to run the police department, where he manages a force of four officerswho spend much of their time patrolling quiet streets and arresting small-time drug dealers.

Most of the time, prosecutors don’t press charges against police — even if there are strong suspicions that an officer has committed a criminal. Prosecutors interviewed for this report say it takes compelling proof that at the time of the shooting the victim posed no threat either to the officer or to bystanders.

Jay Hodge, a former South Carolina prosecutor, said the question boils down to this: Can the evidence disprove the officer’s story that he was defending himself or protecting the public. Hodge recounted one case he had prosecuted in which a sheriff’s deputy said he had opened fire on an unarmed suspect who grabbed for his gun. The autopsy report, Hodge said, told a different story.

“You don’t shoot someone in the back four times and then claim self-defense,” he said. “They can’t be going for a gun if they are running away.”

In half the criminal cases­ identified by The Post and researchers at Bowling Green, prosecutors cited forensics and autopsy reports that showed this very thing: unarmed suspects who had been shot in the back.

Not that long ago, police had wide latitude to shoot fleeing felons. But a 1985 Supreme Court decision changed that. In Tennessee v. Garner, the justices ruled that it was not justifiable for officers to shoot simply to prevent a suspect’s escape. The suspect had to pose a significant threat of death or serious harm to either law enforcement or innocent bystanders for the shooting to be legally justified.

Court decision changed that. In Tennessee v. Garner, the justices ruled that it was not justifiable for officers to shoot simply to prevent a suspect’s escape. The suspect had to pose a significant threat of death or serious harm to either law enforcement or innocent bystanders for the shooting to be legally justified.

In a third of the cases­ where officers faced charges, prosecutors introduced videos into evidence, saying they showed the slain suspects had posed no threat at the moment they were killed. The videos were often shot from cameras mounted on the dashboards of patrol cars, standard equipment for most police departments.

In nearly a quarter of the cases, an officer’s colleagues turned on him, giving statements or testifying that the officer opened fire even though the suspect posed no danger at the time.

Such testimony carries almost unequalled weight with judges and juries because police officers are considered highly credible eyewitnesses as well as experts in the proper use of force, according to prosecutors and defense attorneys. Moreover, because officers so rarely cross the “thin blue line” to testify against a colleague, their evidence can be especially powerful.

And in 10 cases, or about a fifth of the time, prosecutors alleged that officers either planted or destroyed evidence in an attempt to exonerate themselves — a strong indication, prosecutors said, that the officers themselves recognized the shooting was unjustified.

It was late one South Carolina evening 10 years ago, when Darlington County Sheriff’s Deputy Tim Robertson finally caught up with William Sheffield, a 45-year-old white man wanted for stealing a gas grill and three hauling trailers. Under the dim porch light of a mobile home, Robertson, who is white, urged the man to surrender, forcing him to spread his hands against the cab of his GMC pickup truck.

But as Robertson prepared to put the handcuffs on, the suspect lunged to the right, turned and then tried to grab the deputy’s gun, Robertson recounted in an interview with The Post. Robertson, who said he feared for his life, fired two shots. Sheffield broke away and ran for the woods. Robertson gave chase, opening fire again. According to prosecutors, the deputy gunned down the unarmed suspect in the back.

“There was no threat because there was no one around who could get hurt. There was a trail of shell casings that showed the deputy chased him and shot at him as he ran away,” said J.R. Joyner, the lead prosecutor in the case. “One shot was point-blank — an execution shot.”

Joyner said the forensics evidence was “the strongest of any case in my career.”

Prosecutors successfully indicted Robertson on a murder charge, citing the law that bars an officer from shooting a fleeing suspect in the back.

“There was no threat because there was no one around who could get hurt. There was a trail of shell casings that showed the deputy chased him and shot at him as he ran away,” said J.R. Joyner, the lead prosecutor in the case. “One shot was point-blank — an execution shot.”

Joyner said the forensics evidence was “the strongest of any case in my career.”

Prosecutors successfully indicted Robertson on a murder charge, citing the law that bars an officer from shooting a fleeing suspect in the back.

But at trial, jurors would go on to acquit Robertson, believing his account that he was forced to fire the final, fatal shots because the suspect turned back during the chase, attacked him and grabbed for his gun a second time. Robertson would keep his job at the sheriff’s department and be put in charge of training deputies in firearms and use of force.

n Cleveland, Officer Michael Brelo, who is white, was indicted for killing a pair of black suspects after a grand jury reviewed a wide range of evidence, including nearly two dozen video recordings from dashboard cameras, traffic cameras and surveillance cameras mounted at businesses and a school.

The deadly encounter began when the pair, Timothy Russell, 43, and Malissa Williams, 30, drove past the Cleveland police headquarters on a November night in 2012 and their Chevy Malibu fatefully backfired. Officers mistook the sound for gunfire and went in pursuit. Soon, 62 police vehicles were chasing the Chevy through city streets at speeds of up to 110 mph.

The suspects, later found to be under the influence of drugs, came to a stop in a middle school parking lot. Eleven officers got out of their cars and formed a semicircle around the Chevy, court records show. Although two police radio broadcasts had reported that the pair was unarmed, according to transmissions compiled by state investigators, the officers opened fire, shooting 139 times.

Brelo himself fired 34 shots at the car and then climbed onto the hood of the Chevy and fired 15 more times “at close range” through the windshield, state investigation records show.

In a statement to investigators with the Ohio attorney general’s office, Brelo did not deny firing the shots but said he believed gunfire was coming from inside the vehicle. “I’ve never been so afraid in my life,” he said. “I thought my partner and I would be shot and that we were going to be killed.”

A grand jury indicted Brelo on two counts of voluntary manslaughter, saying he acted in a “fit of rage” and “under the influence of sudden passion.”

A lawyer for Brelo, whose trial began Monday, declined to comment.

Stinson, the Bowling Green criminologist, said it is often the case that questionable police shootings are an act of passion. Sometimes, he said, the encounters start with something as simple as a traffic stop and escalate when someone fails to obey the officer’s directions.

“They are used to giving commands and people obeying,” said Stinson, who previously worked as a police officer. “They don’t like it when people don’t listen to them, and things can quickly become violent when people don’t follow their orders.”

Levi Randolph, a black police officer in Gary, Ind., fatally shot a black 16-year-old robbery suspect in the back of the neck after the fleeing teen climbed a fence to escape, court records show.

Prosecutors charged Randolph with reckless homicide.

But when the case went to trial, his attorney told jurors that Randolph had felt threatened by the 6-foot, 200-pound teenager, Vince Smith Jr. Twice during the chase, Randolph said in a deposition, Smith turned around to confront him, both times reaching into the front pocket of his black hooded sweatshirt. He said he thought the teen was going for a gun.

Although Smith turned out to be unarmed, it took jurors only two hours of deliberation to acquit Randolph. Randolph could not be reached for comment.

“Jurors tend to be sympathetic toward police officers,” said Randolph’s attorney, Scott King. “For every movie like ‘Training Day,’ there are 10 movies where cops are underpaid, hard-working, struggling against insurmountable odds and on the side of good.”

The outcome of Randolph’s case is more the rule than the exception and demonstrates the daunting task facing prosecutors in those rare instances when they do charge officers in connection with fatal shootings.

Of the 54 officers who were charged for fatally shooting someone while on duty over the past decade, 35 have had their cases resolved. Of those, a majority — 21 officers — were acquitted or saw their charges dropped.

Jurors usually see the officer as “the good party in the fight,” said David Harris, a University of Pittsburgh law professor and expert in police use of force. “To get them to buy into a story where the officer is the bad guy goes fundamentally against everything they believe.”

Most jurors, experts say, view officers as those who enforce laws, not break them. And unlike civilians, police officers are allowed, even expected, to use force.

“It’s a question of whether it was too much force,” Harris said. “It’s a very flexible standard that has to be interpreted in every case. All this makes it very difficult to convict an officer.”

Most laws that apply to on-duty shootings require jurors to essentially render a verdict on theofficer’s state of mind: Was the officer truly afraid for his life or the lives of others when he fired his weapon? Would a reasonable officer have been afraid?

That’s what Clay Rogers says he was asked to do when he served as a juror for the 2009 trial of a Hartford, Conn., narcotics officer charged with fatally shooting a fleeing black suspect.

“It’s difficult to prove an officer is not justified beyond a reasonable doubt, because you almost have to get inside their head to know what he was thinking and feeling,” Rogers said in an interview with The Post.

The officer, Robert Lawlor, who is white, had fired five shots at a car as it sped away. Two bullets struck a passenger, 18-year-old Jashon Bryant, in the back of the head, killing him.

The officer, Robert Lawlor, who is white, had fired five shots at a car as it sped away. Two bullets struck a passenger, 18-year-old Jashon Bryant, in the back of the head, killing him.

The officer testified before a grand jury that he had initially approached the car, a black Nissan Maxima, because it matched the description of a vehicle used in a homicide. He said he opened fire at the car because he believed that Bryant had a gun and that the vehicle was barreling toward another officer.

Although no weapon was found, Rogers said he and his fellow jurors had to take seriously the officer’s claim that he believed his life and that of his partner were in jeopardy.

Rogers said the jury was also influenced by the tough questions directed at the car’s driver on the witness stand. The officer’s attorney grilled the driver about his criminal past, bringing up the cocaine found in the car and marijuana he had in his jacket on the day of the incident.

“The way the defense made it look was there were these two gangsters out there, riding around, and selling crack,” Rogers recounted. “You had an officer using deadly force, but he was up against dangerous drug dealers. It worked.”

The jury acquitted Lawlor.

His attorney, Michael Georgetti, said in an interview that he worked to build what he sees as a natural alliance between jurors and officers to win the case. “You don’t get people on a jury with a criminal record,” Georgetti said. “If a police officer says stop, they stop. They don’t put their car in drive and speed away.”

As hard as it is for prosecutors to win a conviction or an admission of guilt, it’s even harder to persuade a judge or jury to give an officer significant prison time.

For the nine officers convicted in state prosecutions, sentences ranged from six months to seven years, The Post analysis shows. One of the other cases, the shooting death of the 92-year-old woman in Atlanta, was taken up by federal prosecutors, who added civil rights violations to manslaughter charges and won stiffer sentences, ultimately sending the two convicted officers to prison for six and 10 years.

Six of the officers who faced state prosecutions were convicted after going to trial. On average, they got 31/2 years.

But prosecutors were eager at times to dispense with cases without a trial by negotiating a plea agreement. Winning a conviction against an officer is tough. And the cases can come with bruising headlines and strained relations with the very police department that prosecutors rely on daily to help build other criminal ­cases.

In at least six cases, lawyers for the officers were able to get the charges reduced, resulting in lighter sentences. These cases included convictions as well as instances in which judges deferred convictions and put officers on probation for their actions. These officers on average did about 21/2 years behind bars.

Antonio Taharka, a former police officer in Savannah, Ga., fatally shot a probation violator as he scrambled over a fence, trying to escape arrest. He ended up spending three months in a county jail.

The grand jury that indicted Taharka on voluntary manslaughter charges, which can bring up to 20 years in prison, said the officer had killed the suspect “while acting solely as the result of a sudden, violent and irresistible passion.”

But members of the local African American community rallied around Taharka, recalled former prosecutor David Lock, who had presented the case to the grand jury. “He was an African American officer and was beloved,” Lock said. “There was more of an outcry about why he was being charged versus why not.” At the same time, Lock said, there was little public sympathy for the 41-year-old victim, Anthony Smashum, a black man who had a long rap sheet, including convictions for rape and assault.

Lock said he believes these factors delayed the prosecution and ultimately contributed to lessening the charge against Taharka.

Chatham County District Attorney Meg Heap, who replaced Lock in the elected post, downgraded the charges from voluntary manslaughter, agreeing that Taharka could plead guilty instead to the less-serious charge of involuntary manslaughter, which carries a maximum of 10 years. Heap said in an interview that the lesser charge was a better fit for the facts of the case. But she said her office made no promises about a reduced sentence, leaving that up to the judge.

At sentencing in 2009, Superior Court Judge John E. Morse Jr. said he had to strike “the most delicate balance.” In assessing the fatal incident, he said, “All I can glean from what I have read and heard up to this particular point is that it was not malicious and ill-wanton.” He told Taharka moments later, “What you have to deal with from a day-to-day basis as an officer of the law, no one can stand in your shoes other than you.”

Morse ordered Taharka to spend three months in jail and nine months confined to his home except when he was working. If he follows the terms of his probation of nine years, his record will be wiped clean.

Messages left for Taharka’s lawyers were not returned, nor were a series of e-mails requesting comment. Taharka resigned from the police department about a year after the 2007 shooting.

Georgia Ferrell’s daughter is a police officer. Her son was shot dead by one.

“My daughter loves being a police officer, but she knows that the uniform doesn’t make you a good person,” she said.

Officer Randall Kerrick of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg police department is scheduled to face trial this summer on charges of voluntary manslaughter arising from a fatal encounter with Ferrell’s son in September 2013.

It was well after midnight when Jonathan Ferrell, 24, a former Florida A&M football defensive back, crashed his Toyota Camry, rolling it into a ditch, according to the police report. Dazed, he kicked out the rear window, crawled from the vehicle and made his way to a nearby house to seek helps.

But when he started banging on the door, the woman who lived there panicked and called 911. The officers who responded to the call told investigators that they believed that Ferrell was a threat, records show. When Ferrell, who was black, did not follow their orders to get on the ground, Kerrick, who is white, shot him 10 times, police officials said.

After Police Chief Rodney Monroe saw the 15-second dashcam video of the incident, he arrested Kerrick within the day,day, saying the officer “did not have a lawful right to discharge his weapon during this encounter.”

Kerrick’s attorney Michael Green said the video tells a different story. “Officer Kerrick did his job that night. Although the shooting was a tragedy, it was justified,” Green said. “On the video, you hear the officer telling him multiple times to get down on the ground . . . and at trial, I think you’ll find folks who say [Ferrell] wasn’t necessarily looking for help that evening.”

Georgia Ferrell worries that jurors will believe that account. As someone who has personal reasons to hold most police in high regard, she recognizes how difficult it is to convict and punish an officer.

“Society has put it into our heads that the officer is always right,” she said. “That has to change.”

Alice Crites and Steven Rich contributed to this report.

2044 or Bust: Military Missions Reach Record Levels After U.S. Inks Deal to Remain in Africa for Decades

by Nick Turse

TomDispatch

For three days, wearing a kaleidoscope of camouflage patterns, they huddled together on a military base in Florida. They came from U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) and U.S. Army Special Operations Command, from France and Norway, from Denmark, Germany, and Canada: 13 nations in all. They came to plan a years-long “Special Operations-centric” military campaign supported by conventional forces, a multinational undertaking that — if carried out — might cost hundreds of millions, maybe billions, of dollars and who knows how many lives.

Ask the men involved and they’ll talk about being mindful of “sensitivities” and “cultural differences,” about the importance of “collaboration and coordination,” about the value of a variety of viewpoints, about “perspectives” and “partnerships.” Nonetheless, behind closed doors and unbeknownst to most of the people in their own countries, let alone the countries fixed in their sights, a coterie of Western special ops planners were sketching out a possible multinational military future for a troubled region of Africa.

From January 13th to 15th, representatives from the U.S. and 12 partner nations gathered at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa for an exercise dubbed Silent Quest 15-1. The fictional scenario on which they were to play out their war game had a ripped-from-the-headlines quality to it. It was an amalgam of two perfectly real and ongoing foreign policy and counterterrorism disasters of the post-9/11 era: the growth of Boko Haram in Nigeria and the emergence of the Islamic State, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant or ISIL. The war game centered on the imagined rise of a group dubbed the “Islamic State of Africa” and the spread of its proto-caliphate over parts of Nigeria, Niger, and Cameroon — countries terrorized by the real Boko Haram, which did recently pledge its allegiance to the Islamic State.

Silent Quest 15-1 was just the latest in a series of similarly named exercises — the first took place in March 2013 — designed to help plot out the special ops interventions of the next decade. This war game was no paintball-style walk in the woods. There were no mock firefights, no dress rehearsals. It wasn’t the flag football equivalent of battle. Instead, it was a tabletop exercise building on something all too real: the ever-expanding panoply of U.S. and allied military activities across ever-larger parts of Africa. Speaking of that continent, Matt Pascual, a participant in Silent Quest and the Africa desk officer for SOCOM’s Euro-Africa Support Group, noted that the U.S. and its allies were already dealing with “myriad issues” in the region and, perhaps most importantly, that many of the participating countries “are already there.” The country “already there” the most is, of course, Pascual’s own: the United States.

In recent years, the U.S. has been involved in a variety of multinational interventions in Africa, including one in Libya that involved both a secret war and a conventional campaign of missiles and air strikes, assistance to French forces in the Central African Republic and Mali, and the training and funding of African proxies to do battle against militant groups like Boko Haram as well as Somalia’s al-Shabab and Mali’s Ansar al-Dine. In 2014, the U.S. carried out 674 military activities across Africa, nearly two missions per day, an almost 300% jump in the number of annual operations, exercises, and military-to-military training activities since U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) was established in 2008.

Despite this massive increase in missions and a similar swelling of bases, personnel, and funding, the picture painted last month before the Senate Armed Services Committee by AFRICOM chief General David Rodriguez was startlingly bleak. For all the American efforts across Africa, Rodriguez offered a vision of a continent in crisis, imperiled from East to West by militant groups that have developed, grown in strength, or increased their deadly reach in the face of U.S. counterterrorism efforts.

“Transregional terrorists and criminal networks continue to adapt and expand aggressively,” Rodriguez told committee members. “Al-Shabab has broadened its operations to conduct, or attempt to conduct, asymmetric attacks against Uganda, Ethiopia, Djibouti, and especially Kenya. Libya-based threats are growing rapidly, including an expanding ISIL presence… Boko Haram threatens the ability of the Nigerian government to provide security and basic services in large portions of the northeast.” Despite the grim outcomes since the American military began “pivoting” to Africa after 9/11, the U.S. recently signed an agreement designed to keep its troops based on the continent until almost midcentury.

Mission Creep

For years, the U.S. military has publicly insisted that its efforts in Africa are negligible, intentionally leaving the American people, not to mention most Africans, in the dark about the true size, scale, and scope of its operations there. AFRICOM public affairs personnel and commanders have repeatedly claimed no more than a “light footprint” on the continent. They shrink from talk of camps and outposts, claiming to have just one base anywhere in Africa: Camp Lemonnier in the tiny nation of Djibouti. They don’t like to talk about military operations. They offer detailed information about only a tiny fraction of their training exercises. They refuse to disclose the locations where personnel have been stationed or even counts of the countries involved.

During an interview, an AFRICOM spokesman once expressed his worry to me that even tabulating how many deployments the command has in Africa would offer a “skewed image” of U.S. efforts. Behind closed doors, however, AFRICOM’s officers speak quite a different language. They have repeatedly asserted that the continent is an American “battlefield” and that — make no bones about it — they are already embroiled in an actual “war.”

According to recently released figures from U.S. Africa Command, the scope of that “war” grew dramatically in 2014. In its “posture statement,” AFRICOM reports that it conducted 68 operations last year, up from 55 the year before. These included operations Juniper Micron and Echo Casemate, missions focused on aiding French and African interventions in Mali and the Central African Republic; Observant Compass, an effort to degrade or destroy what’s left of Joseph Kony’s murderous Lord’s Resistance Army in central Africa; and United Assistance, the deployment of military personnel to combat the Ebola crisis in West Africa.

The number of major joint field exercises U.S. personnel engaged in with African military partners inched up from 10 in 2013 to 11 last year. These included African Lion in Morocco, Western Accord in Senegal, Central Accord in Cameroon, and Southern Accord in Malawi, all of which had a field training component and served as capstone events for the prior year’s military-to-military instruction missions.

AFRICOM also conducted maritime security exercises including Obangame Express in the Gulf of Guinea, Saharan Express in the waters off Senegal, and three weeks of maritime security training scenarios as part of Phoenix Express 2014, with sailors from numerous countries including Algeria, Italy, Libya, Malta, Morocco, Tunisia, and Turkey.

The number of security cooperation activities skyrocketed from 481 in 2013 to 595 last year. Such efforts included military training under a “state partnership program” that teams African military forces with U.S. National Guard units and the State Department-funded Africa Contingency Operations Training and Assistance, or ACOTA, program through which U.S. military advisers and mentors provide equipment and instruction to African troops.

In 2013, the combined total of all U.S. activities on the continent reached 546, an average of more than one mission per day. Last year, that number leapt to 674. In other words, U.S. troops were carrying out almost two operations, exercises, or activities — from drone strikes to counterinsurgency instruction, intelligence gathering to marksmanship training — somewhere in Africa every day. This represents an enormous increase from the 172 “missions, activities, programs, and exercises” that AFRICOM inherited from other geographic commands when it began operations in 2008.

Transnational Terror Groups: Something From Nothing

In 2000, a report prepared under the auspices of the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute examined the “African security environment.” While it touched on “internal separatist or rebel movements” in “weak states,” as well as non-state actors like militias and “warlord armies,” there was conspicuously no mention of Islamic extremism or major transnational terrorist threats. Prior to 2001, in fact, the United States did not recognize any terrorist organizations in sub-Saharan Africa and a senior Pentagon official noted that the most feared Islamic militants on the continent had “not engaged in acts of terrorism outside Somalia.”

In the wake of 9/11, even before AFRICOM was created, the U.S. began ramping up operations across the continent in an effort to bolster the counterterror capabilities of allies and insulate Africa from transnational terror groups, namely globe-trotting Islamic extremists. The continent, in other words, was seen as something of a clean slate for experiments in terror prevention.

Billions of dollars have been pumped into Africa to build bases, arm allies, gather intelligence, fight proxy wars, assassinate militants, and conduct perhaps thousands of military missions — and none of it has had its intended effect. Last year, for example, Somali militants “either planned or executed increasingly complex and lethal attacks in Somalia, Kenya, Uganda, Djibouti, and Ethiopia,” according to AFRICOM. Earlier this month, those same al-Shabab militants upped the ante by slaughtering 142 students at a college in Kenya.

And al-Shabab’s deadly growth and spread has hardly been the exception to the rule in Africa. In recent testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, AFRICOM commander Rodriguez rattled off the names of numerous Islamic terror groups that have sprung up in the intervening years, destabilizing the very countries the U.S. had sought to strengthen. While the posture statement he presented put the best gloss possible on Washington’s military efforts in Africa, even a cursory reading of it — and under the circumstances, it’s worth quoting at length — paints a bleak picture of what that “pivot” to Africa has actually meant on the ground. Sections pulled from various parts of the document speak volumes:

“The network of al-Qaeda and its affiliates and adherents continues to exploit Africa’s under-governed regions and porous borders to train and conduct attacks. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant is expanding its presence in North Africa. Terrorists with allegiances to multiple groups are expanding their collaboration in recruitment, financing, training, and operations, both within Africa and trans-regionally. Violent extremist organizations are utilizing increasingly sophisticated improvised explosive devices, and casualties from these weapons in Africa increased by approximately 40 percent in 2014…

“In North and West Africa, Libyan and Nigerian insecurity increasingly threaten U.S. interests. In spite of multinational security efforts, terrorist and criminal networks are gaining strength and interoperability. Al-Qaeda in the Lands of the Islamic Maghreb, Ansar al-Sharia, al-Murabitun, Boko Haram, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, and other violent extremist organizations are exploiting weak governance, corrupt leadership, and porous borders across the Sahel and Maghreb to train and move fighters and distribute resources…

“Libya-based threats to U.S. interests are growing… Libyan governance, security, and economic stability deteriorated significantly in the past year… Today, armed groups control large areas of territory in Libya and operate with impunity. Libya appears to be emerging as a safe haven where terrorists, including al-Qaeda and Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant-affiliated groups, can train and rebuild with impunity. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant is increasingly active in Libya, including in Derna, Benghazi, Tripoli, and Sebha…

“The spillover effects of instability in Libya and northern Mali increase risks to U.S. interests in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, including the success of Tunisia’s democratic transition…

“The security situation in Nigeria also declined in the past year. Boko Haram threatens the functioning of a government that is challenged to maintain its people’s trust and to provide security and other basic services… Boko Haram has launched attacks across Nigeria’s borders into Cameroon, Chad, and Niger…

“…both the Central African Republic and Democratic Republic of the Congo are at risk of further destabilization by insurgent groups, and simmering ethnic tensions in the Great Lakes region have the potential to boil over violently in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.”

All this, mind you, is AFRICOM’s own assessment of the situation on the continent on which it has focused its efforts for the better part of a decade as U.S. missions there soared. In this context, it’s worth reemphasizing that, before the U.S. ramped up those efforts, Africa was — by Washington’s own estimation — relatively free of transnational Islamic terror groups.

Tipping the Scales in Africa

Despite Boko Haram’s pledge of allegiance to the Islamic State and scare headlines lamenting their merger or conflating those or other brutal terror outfits operating under similar monikers, there is currently no real Islamic State of Africa. But the war game carried out at MacDill Air Force Base in January against that fictional group is far from fantasy, representing as it does the next logical step in a series of operations that have been gaining steam since AFRICOM’s birth. And buried in the command’s 2015 Posture Statement is actual news that signals a continuation of this trajectory into the 2040s.

In May 2014, the U.S. reached an agreement — it’s called an “implementing arrangement” — with the government of Djibouti “that secures [its] presence” in that country “through 2044.” In addition, AFRICOM officers are now talking about the possibility of building a string of surveillance outposts along the northern tier of the continent. And don’t forget how, over the past few years, U.S. staging areas, mini-bases, and airfields have popped up in the contiguous nations of Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and – skipping Chad (where AFRICOM recently built temporary facilities for a special ops exercise) — the Central African Republic, South Sudan, Uganda, Kenya, and Ethiopia. All of this suggests that the U.S. military is digging in for the long haul in Africa.

Silent Quest 15-1 was designed as a model to demonstrate just how Washington will conduct “Special Operations-centric” coalition warfare in Africa. It was, in fact, designed to align, wrote Gunnery Sergeant Reina Barnett in SOCOM’s trade publication Tip of the Spear, with the “2020 planning guidance of Army Maj. Gen. James Linder, commander of Special Operations Command Africa.” And the agreement with Djibouti demonstrates that the U.S. military is now beginning to plan for almost a quarter-century beyond that. But, if the last six years — marked by a 300% increase in U.S. missions as well as the spread of terror groups and terrorism in Africa — are any indicator, the results are likely to be anything but pleasing to Washington.

AFRICOM commander David Rodriguez continues to put the best face on U.S. efforts in Africa, citing “progress in several areas through close cooperation with our allies and partners.” His command’s assessment of the situation, however, is remarkably bleak. “Where our national interests compel us to tip the scales and enhance collective security gains, we may have to do more — either by enabling our allies and partners, or acting unilaterally,” reads the posture statement Rodriguez delivered to that Senate committee.

After more than a decade of increasing efforts, however, there’s little evidence that AFRICOM has the slightest idea how to tip the scales in its own favor in Africa.

Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch.com and a fellow at the Nation Institute.

SECRECY NEWS

From the FAS Project on Government Secrecy

Volume 2015, Issue No. 27

April 14, 2015

NO FLY LIST: GOVT OFFERS NEW REDRESS PROCEDURES

The government will no longer refuse to confirm or deny that persons who are prevented from boarding commercial aircraft have been placed on the “No Fly List,” and such persons will have new opportunities to challenge the denial of boarding, the Department of Justice announced yesterday in a court filing.

Until now, the Government refused to acknowledge whether or not an individual traveler had been placed on the No Fly List and, if so, what the basis for such a designation was. That is no longer the case, the new court filing said:

“Under the previous redress procedures, individuals who had submitted inquiries to DHS TRIP [the Department of Homeland Security Traveler Redress Inquiry Program] generally received a letter responding to their inquiry that neither confirmed nor denied their No Fly status.”

“Under the newly revised procedures, a U.S. person who purchases a ticket, is denied boarding at the airport, subsequently applies for redress through DHS TRIP about the denial of boarding, and is on the No Fly List after a redress review, will now receive a letter providing his or her status on the No Fly List and the option to receive and/or submit additional information.”

If the individual traveler chooses to pursue the matter, DHS “will provide a second, more detailed response. This second letter will identify the specific criterion under which the individual has been placed on the No Fly List and will include an unclassified summary of information supporting the individual’s No Fly List status, to the extent feasible, consistent with the national security and law enforcement interests at stake.”

The new redress procedures were developed in response to legal challenges to the No Fly List procedures, which argued that the procedures were constitutionally deficient or otherwise improper. The notice of the new procedures was filed yesterday in the pending lawsuit Gulet Mohamed v. Eric H. Holder, Jr., which is one of the ongoing lawsuits over the No Fly List.

“A number of travelers who dispute any connection to terrorism have alleged that they have been denied boarding on commercial aircraft,” a recent Congressional Research Service report noted. “A denial of entry can occur, for example, when a person’s name and/or date of birth correspond or are similar to the identity of someone in the government’s watchlist database.”

The CRS report, which predates the newly announced procedures, reviewed many of the legal issues involved. See The No Fly List: Procedural Due Process and Hurdles to Litigation, April 2, 2015.

Russian naval ship evacuates over 300 people stranded in Yemen

April 13, 2015

RT

The Russian Navy vessel Priazovye has helped to evacuate 308 people from war-torn Yemen. The Russian Defense Ministry stated citizens from 19 countries had been rescued, including Russian, Ukrainian, US and Yemini nationals.

The Russian warship departed the southern Yemeni port of Aden on Sunday night and is due to arrive in Djibouti, on the east coast of Africa on Monday morning.

“Among those evacuated from the zone of hostilities in the Aden area, were citizens of 19 countries, including 45 Russian nationals,” Igor Konashenkov, a Defense Ministry spokesman said on Sunday.

There were also a number of foreign citizens aboard the Priazovye, including 18 Americans, 14 Ukrainians, nine Belorusians, five UK citizens, as well as 159 Yemeni nationals.

The Russian warship had been based in the Gulf of Aden to help carry out anti-piracy missions, before it was sent towards Yemen to aid the evacuation. It follows weeks of Saudi-led airstrikes against Houthi anti-government rebels.

This is not the first Russian-led evacuation in Yemen. Earlier in April, Moscow organized flights and ship to help evacuate its own citizens, as well as a number of foreigners, from the conflict area. So far, Russian aircraft have made five rescue missions into Yemen to airlift people caught in the war-zone to safety.

At least eight other countries, including China, India and Pakistan, have also been actively working on evacuating people from Yemen, both by sea and by air.

Meanwhile, the US has been criticized for failing to evacuate its own citizens from Yemen, where up to 4,000 American nationals are believed to be stranded.

US citizens currently in Yemen have lashed out against Washington for failing to act. “Nobody will help us evacuate. The reply [of the US government] was an automated message that they do not have any evacuation plans. Basically we are left on our own,” Arwa Al-Iraine, a US citizen trapped in Yemen told RT.

Three Arab and Muslim human rights groups filed a lawsuit against the Obama administration, which includes dozens of cases of American citizens who have been unable to leave Yemen.

Towards the end of March, Saudi Arabia, along with several other Arab states, including Jordan, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, launched airstrikes targeting Shia Houthi rebels, who had seized the Yemeni capital and large areas in the west of the country.

The Saudi-led coalition has taken over Yemen’s airfields and seaports, and bombed the Houthi stronghold of Saada in the north, the capital Sanaa and the port city of Aden in the south.

According to some of the latest reports, up to 1,042 people have died in the fighting, the International Federation of the Red Cross reported on Thursday.

Trapped in Yemen, Americans File Lawsuit Against US Government

April 10,2015

by Murtaza Hussain

The Intercept

Khalid Awnallah, a Yemeni-American, is safe today in Michigan, but his wife and four children are among the thousands of American citizens believed stranded in the midst of an escalating civil war in Yemen.

“They are in a bad situation there, they are hearing bombs all the time and are scared to go out,” said Awnallah, whose family is in the Rada’a district of southern Yemen, a site of frequent battles between Houthi rebels and members of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

Despite the ongoing danger to their lives, Awnallah says that his family has received no assistance from the U.S. government. “[My family] has tried to get in touch, but no one is helping them,” he said. “They are asking me all the time if they are going to die here.”

On April 9, the Council on American-Islamic Relations filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government on behalf of Awnallah’s family and dozens of other Yemeni-Americans trapped in the country. Citing Executive Order 12656, which obligates “protection or evacuation of U.S. Citizens and nationals abroad” in times of danger, the lawsuit further alleges that the U.S. government’s refusal so far to conduct evacuation operations in Yemen represents the continuation of longstanding policies that effectively deny full citizenship rights to Yemeni-Americans.

“The U.S. has conducted dozens of evacuations of its citizens over the past decades from situations even more precarious than this,” said Gadeir Abbas, one of the attorneys representing the plaintiffs in the suit. “Many countries with far less capabilities have evacuated their citizens. The fact that Yemeni-Americans are being left without help leaves the impression that they’re viewed as expendable, second-class citizens.”

While countries such as China, Russia, India, Pakistan and even Somalia have all conducted operations to rescue their citizens still in Yemen, the United States has so far declined to launch similar efforts on behalf of Americans in the country. On April 3, State Department spokesperson Marie Harf announced that despite the deteriorating security situation in the country, there was “no plan” to develop efforts to evacuate American citizens there.

Given the lack of government action, the 55,000 Americans believed to be in Yemen have been left to make their own plans to flee the country. One 26-year-old Yemeni-American man from San Francisco had to engineer his own escape by driving across the country, passing through dangerous checkpoints, and even experiencing temporary kidnapping, before escaping on a small rented fishing boat out to the Red Sea.

Less fortunate was Jamal al-Labani, a 45-year-old father of one from California, who last week became the first American citizen known to die in the conflict when he was killed by a mortar strike in the southern city of Aden.

Lena Masri, another lawyer representing American citizens and their families trapped in the conflict, told The Intercept that threats to Americans have increased, with U.S. citizens specifically being threatened with violence by extremist groups. “The father of one my clients last week went into hiding after receiving a death threat from a member of ISIS,” he said. “They told him that they knew he was an American, and that they were going to kill him.”

For many Yemeni-Americans, their predicament is compounded by what they allege to be systematic denial of their citizenship and consular rights by the U.S. government. “A lot of Yemeni-Americans have been stranded like this since before the conflict even started; the U.S. embassy often declines to renew their passports or simply confiscates them when brought for renewal,” Masri said. “Many Yemeni-Americans have been subjected to extrajudicial exile. They’re not treated as full citizens.”

A 2010 State Department Office of the Inspector General report stated that “a large number of Yemeni-Americans reflect local standards of illiteracy and lack of education,” while characterizing Yemeni-Americans as having a tenuous or incomplete connection with the United States, despite their citizenship there. It has long been alleged that Americans living in Yemen are at risk of having their citizenship documents confiscated by American officials while seeking consular services, so much so that in 2013, the American Civil Liberties Union released a pamphlet advising Yemeni-Americans to be cautious when attempting to obtain such services while abroad.

Contacted by The Intercept for comment about the lawsuit, the State Department stated that it was not their policy to comment on pending litigation. Advisory messages posted on the website of the U.S. Embassy in Sana’a have suggested American citizens could seek help from the Indian government, while also stating that they “have no contact information for [Indian] vessels” and “cannot guarantee all citizens [can] be accommodated.”

The conflict in Yemen recently escalated when a regional coalition of countries, including several U.S. allies, began conducting military operations against Houthi rebels in the country. The U.S. military is reported to be offering intelligence and logistical support to these forces. Three U.S. Navy ships are also believed to be stationed near the southern port of Aden as part of these operations, but they have not been offered for evacuation assistance.

In response to questions in an April 6 press briefing about the ongoing decision to deny evacuation services to Yemeni-Americans trapped in the conflict, Harf said: “It’s not that we can’t. There’s always a decision — different factors are weighed. … If we have any changes to whether or not we’ll evacuate people, we will certainly let folks know.”

That same day, the State Department posted a notice that the International Organization for Migration (IOM) was planning a flight to evacuate U.S. citizens from Yemen, though it’s unclear if any flight actually departed. “The Department of State cannot guarantee that all U.S. citizens seeking to depart via an IOM flight can be accommodated,” the notice read.

Putin Lifts Ban on Russian Missile Sales to Iran

April 13, 2015

by Neil MacFarquahar

Mew York Times

MOSCOW — President Vladimir V. Putin on Monday approved the delivery of a sophisticated air defense missile system to Iran, potentially complicating negotiations on Tehran’s nuclear program and further straining ties with Washington.

The sale could also undermine the Obama administration’s efforts to sell Congress and foreign allies on the nuclear deal, which Iran and the United States are still struggling to complete. It might also reduce the United States’ leverage in the talks by making it much harder for the United States or Israel to mount airstrikes against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure if the country ignored such an agreement.

“It is significant as it complicates the calculus for planning any military option involving airstrikes,” said David A. Deptula, a retired three-star general who served as the Air Force’s deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.

President Vladimir V. Putin is cultivating ties with countries hostile to the United States. Credit Pool photo by Mikhail Klimentyev No timetable was announced for delivering the weapons, S-300 surface-to-air missiles. The sale was suspended five years ago amid a flurry of United Nations sanctions against the Islamic republic.

Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, said that far from complicating the continuing negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program the missile sales would help them along.

“It was done in the spirit of good will in order to encourage progress in the talks,” Mr. Lavrov said in a televised statement. “We believe that the need for this kind of embargo, indeed a separate, voluntary Russian embargo, has completely disappeared.”

The missile deal does not pose a threat to Israel, Mr. Lavrov said, emphasizing that the S-300 is a defensive weapon.

The five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and Germany have been negotiating with Iran for years to try to make sure that its nuclear program remains peaceful.

The broad framework of a deal reached in Lausanne, Switzerland, on April 2 was preliminary, with several difficult issues still to be resolved by a June 30 deadline, including the pace at which sanctions should be lifted. The last thing proponents of the deal want to see is a rush to shower benefits on Iran before the final agreement is reached.

Along with congressional Republicans, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been sharply critical of the nuclear deal, saying that although it would free Iran from debilitating economic sanctions, it would do nothing to stop the country from getting a nuclear weapon.

On Monday, his intelligence minister, Yuval Steinitz, issued a statement saying the deal showed that “the economic momentum in Iran that will come in the wake of lifting the sanctions will be exploited for armaments and not used for the welfare of the Iranian people.”

Iran, he added, “is being allowed to arm itself with advanced weapons that will only increase its aggression.”

White House officials repeated the administration’s objections to the missile sale, noting that Secretary of State John Kerry had expressed those concerns recently to Mr. Lavrov.

“I’m not in a position to speculate on the decision-making process that Russia is engaged in right now,” said Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary. “But I do think it’s safe to say that Russia understands that the United States certainly takes very seriously the safety and security of our allies in the region.”

Mr. Earnest also said the administration was concerned about the possibility that Russia could enter into a deal with Iran to barter food for oil that could raise “potential sanctions concerns.”

“We’ll obviously evaluate these two proposals moving forward,” Mr. Earnest said. “We’ve been in direct touch with Russia to make sure that they understand — and they do — the potential concerns we have.”

Mr. Lavrov, alluding to recent airstrikes by Saudi Arabia and others against Iranian allies in Yemen, suggested that Iran needed a more robust air defense system. “For Iran, which is located in the volatile Middle East region, a modern air defense system is very important, especially now that tensions have run high in the surrounding environment,” he said.

Mr. Lavrov also noted that Moscow could use the money. The Russian economy, battered by a steep drop in the price of oil and by Western sanctions imposed over Moscow’s actions on behalf of separatists in Ukraine, is expected to fall into a recession this year.

Russia has been aggressively seeking new trade partners to prove that Western sanctions have not isolated it from the global economy. Although the full details have not been disclosed, the Russian news media reported that Moscow had negotiated an oil-for-goods exchange with Iran that would involve acquiring some 500,000 barrels of Iranian oil a day in exchange for Russian equipment and goods. Iran has long been one of the main buyers of Russian wheat, for example.

Since resuming the presidency in 2012, Mr. Putin has worked to restore some of the great-power status Russia lost with the disintegration of the Soviet Union, not least by cultivating relations with countries hostile to the United States, like Venezuela and, to some extent, China. Cultivating Iran fits into that pattern.

For Russia, “it is always good to have some third world countries hostile to the West, hostile to America,” said Georgy I. Mirsky of the Institute of World Economy and International Relations, who is one of Russia’s leading Middle East analysts.

Even if an eventual nuclear agreement drives some degree of reconciliation between the West and Iran, the early lifting of the missile deal signals that “Russia will always be a really loyal partner and, if not an ally, at least a friend of Iran,” he said.

Not surprisingly, Iran praised the move as an important step toward improved relations.

“If Russia fulfills its commitment to deliver the S-300 missile system to Iran, it will be a step towards boosting the relations and collaborations between the two countries,” Iran’s deputy defense minister, Reza Talaei-Nik, told the semiofficial Tasnim News Agency on Monday. “It will be a step forward.”

There was some debate as to just how much the missiles would improve Iran’s military capabilities.

The five S-300 squadrons cannot shield all of Iran’s nuclear facilities, said Simon Saradzhyan, an expert on arms control and Russia at Harvard University’s Belfer Center, while noting that Russia just sold China the more sophisticated S-400 system. The official Tass news agency reported that in February Moscow offered Tehran an air defense system more modern than the S-300, but that no decision had been made.

Still, military experts said the highly capable S-300 system would make it much harder for the United States or Israel to stage airstrikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Although Iran denies that it is using its civilian nuclear program to mask efforts to build a bomb, many Western countries are dubious. And Israel has made no secret of its willingness to consider a military strike to halt Iran’s progress, though it is not known to possess bunker-buster bombs powerful enough to destroy all of Iran’s bomb-making capacity.

More than missile systems, what Iran really needs is to escape the principal financial and economic sanctions, the ones that cut off substantial trade and access to much of the world’s banking system, Mr. Saradzhyan said.

Reporting was contributed by Andrew Roth from Moscow, Jodi Rudoren from Jerusalem, Thomas Erdbrink from Tehran, and Michael R. Gordon and Michael D. Shear from Washington.

‘Submarine’ in Sweden was only civilian boat

April 13 2015

TheLocal.sa

A suspected submarine spotted in the Stockholm archipelago a week after Sweden’s extensive hunt for Russian underwater vessels last autumn was only a civilian boat, Sweden’s Armed Forces have now said. But they remain convinced that the first sighting was a small foreign sub.

On October 31st 2014, retired naval officer Sven Olof Kviman snapped a picture of what looked like a 20-30 metre long, black submarine in waters just outside Lidingö in Stockholm. The incident has remained unconfirmed, but has been classed by the military as a “potential” submarine.

But Rear Admiral Anders Grenstad has now told Swedish newspapers that the Armed Forces reported to the Swedish government last Wednesday that the suspected underwater vessel was in fact only a civilian “working boat”.

“The analysis has shown that the photograph taken in Stockholm’s inner archipelago was of a smaller boat,” Grenstad told Dagens Nyheter on Monday.

According to Grenstad, the picture instead showed the boat “Time Bandit”, a 10.5 metre long, white plastic boat. But the boatman using the vessel on October 31st claimed the Swedish military had not been in contact with him.

“The navy hasn’t spoken to me. My boat is visible in the picture – but not where the Armed Forces say it is, but further away,” he told Dagens Nyheter.

And Kviman, who participated in Sweden’s Cold War submarine hunts in the 1980s and 90s, remains convinced of what he saw.

“It is completely impossible that we have got this wrong, it would mean both my wife and I were colour blind. ‘Time Bandit’, at a length of 10 metres, is of a completely different size to the submarine. I saw the submarine above water: the bow, stern and tower. It is always difficult to determine the size, but it was around 20-30 metres long,” he told Dagens Nyheter.

Between October 17th and 24th, Sweden launched an extensive naval search operation after a suspected foreign mini-sub – widely thought to be Russian – in the Stockholm archipelago. Grenstad confirmed that the Armed Forces’ view is still that this incursion took place, although the military has never confirmed that the vessel came from Russia.

“The assessment that Swedish territory was violated in October 2014, remains in full,” he told Dagens Nyheter.

The Swedish Armed Forces said in a statement on their website late on Sunday that an inquiry into the October 17th-24th submarine incursion is ongoing and is expected to be completed later this spring.

Oil-rich nations are dumping US assets at a record pace

April 14, 2015

by Javier Blas

Bloomberg

In the heady days of the commodity boom, oil-rich nations accumulated billions of dollars in reserves they invested in U.S. debt and other securities. They also occasionally bought trophy assets, such as Manhattan skyscrapers, luxury homes in London or Paris Saint-Germain Football Club.

Now that oil prices have dropped by half to $50 a barrel, Saudi Arabia and other commodity-rich nations are fast drawing down those “petrodollar” reserves. Some nations, such as Angola, are burning through their savings at a record pace, removing a source of liquidity from global markets.

If oil and other commodity prices remain depressed, the trend will cut demand for everything from European government debt to U.S. real estate as producing nations seek to fill holes in their domestic budgets.

“This is the first time in 20 years that OPEC nations will be sucking liquidity out of the market rather than adding to it through investments,” said David Spegel, head of emerging markets sovereign credit research at BNP Paribas SA in London.

Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil producer, is the prime example of the swiftness and magnitude of the selloff: its foreign exchange reserves fell by $20.2 billion in February, the biggest monthly drop in at least 15 years, according to data from the

Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency. That’s almost double the drop after the financial crisis in early 2009, when oil prices plunged and Riyadh consumed $11.6 billion of its reserves in a single month.

The International Monetary Fund commodity index, a broad basket of natural resources from iron ore and oil to bananas and copper, fell in January to its lowest since mid-2009. Although the index has recovered a little since then, it still is down more than 40 percent from a record high set in early 2011.

Oil futures in New York traded at $52.78 a barrel today, 49 percent lower than a year ago.

Reserves Drop

A concomitant drop in foreign reserves, revealed in data from national central banks and the IMF, is affecting nations from oil producer Oman to copper-rich Chile and cotton-growing Burkina Faso. Reserves are dropping faster than during the last commodity price plunge in 2008 and 2009.

In Angola, reserves dropped last year by $5.5 billion, the biggest annual decline since records started 20 years ago. For Nigeria, foreign reserves fell in February by $2.9 billion, the biggest monthly drop since comparable data started in 2010.

Algeria, one of the world’s top natural gas exporters, saw its funds fall by $11.6 billion in January, the largest monthly drop in a quarter of century. At that rate, it will empty the reserves in 15 months.

Sales Decline

Excluding Iran, whose sales are subject to some sanctions, members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries are expected to earn $380 billion selling their oil this year, according to U.S. estimates. That represents a $350 billion drop from 2014 — the largest one-year decline in history.

“The shock for oil-rich countries is enormous,” Rabah Arezki, head of the commodities research team at the IMF in Washington, said in an interview.

Oil-rich countries will sell more than $200 billion of assets this year to bridge the gap left between high fiscal spending and low revenues, Spegel said.

The drawdown reverses a decade-long inflow into the coffers of commodity-rich nations which helped to increase funds available for investment and boost asset prices. Bond purchases have helped to keep interest rates low.

Oil producers recycled a large portion of their petrodollars — a term coined for the dollar-denominated oil trade — by buying sovereign debt of the U.S. and other countries. As they draw down reserves, Middle East countries are likely to sell “low-yielding European assets,” George Saravelos, strategist at Deutsche Bank AG, said in a note to clients.

Potential Effects

The potential impact of the selloff has divided analysts and officials.

One argument is that petrodollars and other commodity- linked foreign reserves are not a large enough force in an ocean of investments from pension funds, asset managers, insurers and individuals to make a real impact in asset prices and overall liquidity. Plus, bond purchases by central banks involved in so- called quantitative easing mitigates the impact of sales.

The other school of thought, broadly backed by the IMF, says that petrodollars matter because they’re significant enough to turn market sentiment as flows switch direction.

Market Sentiment

The change in commodity-related foreign reserve flows will have “an impact around the margins” in global markets, said Albert Edwards, global strategist at Societe Generale SA.

The disagreement is partly due to a lack of transparency. Tracking the change in commodity-driven savings is difficult because not all countries release timely data and some don’t disclose the size of their sovereign wealth funds.

Nonetheless, available data shows foreign savings by commodity-rich nations are dropping across the board. In Chile, the world’s top copper exporter, foreign savings fell $1.9 billion in February, the biggest drop in three years.

Analysts and officials anticipate that commodity-rich countries will continue selling off foreign assets through the year.

The IMF’s Arezki said that unless they cut spending, resources-rich nations “have no choice but to draw on their financial assets when available” as oil prices are well below the fiscal break-even needed by many exporting nations. The IMF estimates that many oil countries would only balance their budgets if crude prices recover to $75 or higher.

Saudi Arabia’s finance minister said in February that the world’s largest oil exporter had enough reserves to to last for “quite some time.”

WASHINGTON — For weeks on Capitol Hill, lawmakers have been peppering Pentagon officials about their plans in the Arctic. Russia, it seems, is winning in the Arctic while the US military hasn’t even got its snow boots on.

Lawmakers in most instances referenced the testimony of Joint Chiefs Chairman Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, who with Defense Secretary Ash Carter, acknowledged the region as strategically important. Russia had just decided to reactivate six brigades, four of them in the Arctic, Dempsey said in response to questions from Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska.

It was a factoid that appeared long after Dempsey’s mention of it at that March 3 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, bolstered by an Associated Press report March 12 that the Russian military had launched sweeping military maneuvers in the Arctic and other areas, a show of force ordered by President Vladimir Putin amid spiraling tensions with the West over Ukraine. The five-day Arctic drills involved 38,000 servicemen, more than 50 surface ships and submarines, and 110 aircraft.

The combination fueled a push and pull in budget hearings that seemed to produce little beside agreement between lawmakers and military officials that the Arctic is important. Between the Navy and Coast Guard, some lawmakers were confused about who is responsible for the region.

It is US Northern Command, which took responsibility for the region in October. Its ambitious mandate — in line with DoD’s 2013 Arctic Strategy — includes persistent domain awareness, robust communications, deployable forces and infrastructure in the Arctic.

Yet the US cannot reliably navigate, communicate or sustain its forces in the Arctic, NORTHCOM’s commander Adm. William Gortney said at a March 12 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing.

NORTHCOM is studying requirements that would inform its operational plans, with a report due in the spring, he said.

At the hearing, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., expressed concern over Russia’s icebreaker fleet, its bomber runs in the region, and “that we’re well behind the Russians in terms of this, not only as an opportunity, but also as a growing area of military competition, that they’re clearly making it out to be.”

“We need to figure out what are the capabilities that we need, because it’s a very harsh place,” Gortney told Sullivan at the hearing. “I mean, I love visiting your state, but it’s a hard place to live and operate.”

Sullivan, the most vocal on the issue, lamented while questioning a Navy official at a SASC hearing on March 11, “We have a 13-page Arctic strategy that nobody seems to be paying attention to in my view.”

Sullivan had been asking about the Arctic and icebreakers in hearings all week and not getting the answers he wanted. The chief of naval operations, at a different hearing would not comment about about the need for new icebreakers, Sullivan said, because they fall under the purview of the Coast Guard and Department of Homeland Security.

Sullivan then asked Thomas Dee, the deputy assistant secretary of the Navy for expeditionary programs and logistics.

“You don’t have to answer here, but I’d like the Navy collectively to get back to us and just answer the simple question — is it in the national interest of the United States given the developments in the Arctic, to have an additional heavy icebreaker. I’m not interested in whose budget it is or ‘sorry, that’s not my [issue].’ National security is everybody’s issue.

Land forces did not get a pass. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, noted in a March 11 Senate Appropriations Committee hearing that Alaska’s congressional delegation had written a letter to Army leadership suggesting that instead of drawing down the Army presence in Alaska, which was the subject of listening sessions there earlier in the month, the Army do the opposite.

Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno, at the hearing, said he would develop the Army’s strategy based on the prescription of NORTHCOM’S coming strategy. In response to questions from Murkowski about the wisdom of troop cuts in Alaska, Odierno repeated a theme of his testimony: The Army’s budget is stretched to the limit.

“I believe it’s an important piece of what we do in the Pacific,” he said of Alaska. “There’s lots of areas I could make that same comment [about]. And that’s the problem. We now have to make difficult decisions that impact our security. And that’s somewhat distressing, frankly.”

At a SASC hearing on Wednesday, Odierno gave Sullivan a similar response, that the Army is not large enough to meet an Arctic threat and that there are other contingency plans it cannot meet.

To at least make a point about the value of soldiers in Alaska, Sullivan asked if the Army could have participated in recent Army-Air Force exercises in the region with anyone by Alaska-stationed troops.

“In the Arctic environment, no, because they are specifically trained to operate in Arctic weather,” Odierno said. “It would take months of training for them to be prepared to operate in such a harsh environment.”​

One of the most charged exchanges came on Wednesday at a House Armed Services Committee hearing. Rep. John Garamendi, D-Calif., grilled Vice Adm. Charles Michel, the Coast Guard’s deputy commandant for operations, over the service’s deliberative approach to fielding an icebreaker.

Coast Guard’s only active heavy icebreaker is the 40-year-old Polar Star. Its sister ship, the Polar Sea, was cannibalized to get the Polar Star underway; it has to undergo an 15- to 18-month survey, and could take up to 10 years to reactivate. There is also a medium icebreaker, the Healy.

These icebreakers are not warships. They largely conduct research missions in the Arctic and, including an annual mission, called Operation Deep Freeze, to break through the Antarctic ice to resupply McMurdo Station, a US research facility in Antarctica.

Asked about a new icebreaker for the US, Michel said the service is in the early stages of an acquisition. While it was clear that it would be expensive to build, requiring special steel and construction techniques, it was unclear who might do the building.

“The problem is, sir, is that we have not built a heavy Polar-class icebreaker in this country for over 40 years. The Polar-class were the last that were done,” Michel told Garamendi.

“And these are exceedingly complicated ships. Just because they exist in one of the most challenging environments in the earth, and they’re basically designed to collide with blocks of solid ice.”

Garamendi replied, “We know that we buy our rocket engines from Russia. Maybe we can buy a ship from Russia. Since you seem not to be too anxious to get about the task.”

When Garamendi pressed Michel for information to fuel a decision about fielding, Michel said he would provide it as soon as he could get it. That set Garamendi off.

“I think I had best stop because I am about to climb up and down your back,” Garamendi said. “That answer is not a satisfactory answer: As soon as you can get it.”

Sen. Randy Forbes, R-Va., stepped in with an olive branch. The Navy is looking at multibillion-dollar funding gaps for submarines, ships and ballistic missile defenses, he said. That is to say, it’s up to Congress.

“Last year the Marine Corps had to fight to get its amphibious ship, which we wouldn’t have gotten if it hadn’t been for [Virginia Republican Rep. Rob Wittman's] hard work on his subcommittee,” Forbes said. “We realize you can’t build it without dollars.”

E-mail: jgould@defensenews.com

Counterpoint

Russia To Build ‘Self-Sufficient’ Arctic Military Force By 2018 In Latest Sign Of Buildup

April 1, 2015

by Thomas Barrabi

International Business Times

Russia plans to develop a “self-sufficient” standing military force based in the territory it owns in the Arctic, according to a report. The military force will include Air Force and air defense subunits. Russia will also create a new training center in the Arctic.

“The Russian military group in the Arctic will be built up on the mainland and on the islands. This buildup is already in progress. By 2018 there will emerge a self-sufficient group incorporating radio reconnaissance companies, the way it was in the past,” a senior member of Russia’s Defense Ministry told TASS, a Kremlin-owned news agency.

The Arctic buildup is the latest byproduct of strained relations between Russian President Vladimir Putin and leaders in the West. Tensions over Russia’s annexation of Crimea last year and conflict between government soldiers and pro-Russian separatist rebels in Ukraine have seen both Russia and NATO forces vow to build up their forces.

Russia’s military sent 38,000 soldiers, more than 100 aircraft and approximately 50 naval vessels to carry out five days of military drills in the Arctic last month, according to the Associated Press. The training exercises were reportedly meant to test the Russian military’s ability to rapidly deploy forces from the mainland and to test the combat readiness of its Northern Fleet.

“New challenges and threats to military security require the armed forces to further boost their military capabilities. Special attention must be paid to newly created strategic formations in the north,” Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said on Russian television on March 16, according to Reuters. Shoigu said Putin personally ordered the drills.

Russia extended long-range bomber patrols last November to reach as far as the Arctic circle and the Gulf of Mexico. Again, Putin was said to be responsible for the measure. The Russian president has purportedly vowed to spend $340 billion on military advancement by 2020.

The FBI Informant Who Mounted a Sting Operation Against the FBI

April 15, 2015

by Trevor Aaronson

The Intercept

When you’re introduced to Saeed Torres in the new documentary (T)ERROR, you hear him bickering with the filmmaker, Lyric Cabral. The screen is black.

“I told you I didn’t want my face in that shit,” he says.

“Even if your face is shown, how would somebody come after you?” Cabral asks.

“You’d be surprised who knows me,” Torres insists.

The blackness lifts. Torres is dressed in a chef’s apron and a white headscarf, making hot dogs at an amateur basketball game, as if he were an all-American guy.

“I might not even make no fucking independent film,” he says, irritated.

Torres isn’t an all-American guy. He’s an FBI informant, one of more than 15,000 domestic spies who make up the largest surveillance network ever created in the United States. During J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO operations, the bureau had just 1,500 informants. The drug war brought that number up to about 6,000. After 9/11, the bureau recruited so many new informants — many of them crooks and convicts, desperate for money or leniency on previous crimes — that the government had to develop software to help agents track their spies.

Torres agreed to participate in that independent film, of course. In (T)ERROR, which has its New York premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 16, he offers the rest of us an unprecedented look inside an FBI counterterrorism sting as it unfolds. The documentary is compelling for its intimate portrayal of a single informant who has played a key role in several major terrorism cases.

Informants represent the manpower behind the FBI’s controversial stings, which are intended to find would-be terrorists before they attack. In the decade after 9/11, 158 defendants were prosecuted following these undercover operations, which are usually led by an informant and provide the means and opportunity for someone to attempt to commit an act of terrorism. A Human Rights Watch report in 2014 criticized the FBI for targeting “particularly vulnerable people, including those with intellectual and mental disabilities and the indigent.” Late last week, for example, the FBI arrested a mentally troubled 20-year-old in Topeka, Kansas, after he allegedly attempted to bomb Fort Riley with the help of two undercover FBI informants.

While there are more than 15,000 FBI informants, most are low-level operatives who provide scraps of information or tips about people in their community. Only a few of them at any time are high-level operators like Torres — professional liars who travel the country as agents provocateur in elaborate stings. They can make $100,000 or more for every case they work. Torres, a former Black Panther and convict who robbed New York City transit booths, is one of these operators, a freelance agent who portrays himself as a “radicalized Muslim,” as the government’s terminology puts it.

Torres was the informant behind FBI stings that targeted Tarik Shah, a Bronx jazz pianist who was convicted of providing material support for terrorists in 2007, after he pledged allegiance to Al Qaeda in front of an undercover agent, and Mohammed Ali Hassan al-Moayad, a Yemeni cleric in Brooklyn who bragged about his connections to Osama bin Laden. Al-Moayad pleaded guilty to conspiring to raise money for Hamas, and after he served six years behind bars, an appeals court overturned his conviction, ruling that he did not receive a fair trial. He then was deported to Yemen, where he received a hero’s welcome. Shah is in federal prison, serving a 15-year sentence.

(T)ERROR picks up Torres’s story after these stings (warning to readers: spoilers ahead). Living in a rundown apartment somewhere in the Northeast, he gets a call from the FBI. They want him to go to Pittsburgh to get to know a terrorism suspect — a 34-year-old white Muslim convert named Khalifah al-Akili.

He packs up his car and his dog and moves into an FBI safe house around the corner from al-Akili’s apartment building. The cameras follow Torres for months as he struggles to gather any evidence that al-Akili poses a threat to national security. One of the remarkable aspects of this documentary — and of the way the FBI conducts its stings — is that Torres flatly admits that the target of his FBI operation isn’t dangerous. He isn’t on his way to becoming a terrorist.

And here’s where (T)ERROR brings viewers into a previously unseen world — as the FBI sting unravels.

The agents, apparently frustrated that Torres couldn’t build a case on al-Akili, bring in a second informant, Shahed Hussain, and tell Torres to make the introduction. Hussain is a con artist from Albany, New York, who was convicted of participating in a scam to give driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants. He came to the U.S. from Pakistan in 1994, after being arrested in Karachi on a murder charge. Hussain had been used by the FBI before — he was the bureau’s undercover informant in an Albany terrorism case as well as in a sting that targeted the so-called Newburgh Four — four poor black men who plotted with Hussain to bomb synagogues in the Bronx and to fire Stinger missiles at airplanes, though only after Hussain had offered the lead defendant, a mentally troubled man named James Cromitie, $250,000 if he participated in the plot. (The four suspects received lengthy prison sentences.)

There’s no shortage of embarrassing moments for the FBI in its dozens of counterterrorism stings since 9/11. In Boston, an FBI informant who was working a counterterrorism case was caught on an FBI camera purchasing heroin, which wasn’t part of his assignment. In case after case, the FBI experiences so-called “recorder malfunctions” — usually at the most unfortunate time for the defendant, such as at the very beginning of the sting or, as in an operation involving a Baltimore teenager, when the target was attempting to back out of the plot. More recently, FBI agents accidentally recorded themselves calling the subject of their undercover investigation a “retarded fool” whose terrorist ambitions were “wishy-washy.”

As soon as Hussain is introduced into the al-Akili case, the FBI’s work is revealed as similarly ham-handed. Hussain blows the introduction by being overeager, giving al-Akili reason to suspect Torres and Hussain are government agents. Hussain hands al-Akili his business card, and a suspicious al-Akili subsequently Googles the phone number. His search brings up an FBI document from the Newburgh Four case — one that I had obtained and posted online as part of a story for Mother Jones. The FBI had never bothered to change Hussain’s cell phone number. Al-Akili discovers the story I wrote about Hussain — “The Making of an FBI Superinformant” — and realizes he’s the target of an FBI investigation.

Instead of cowering, al-Akili emails dozens of lawyers and journalists, including me.

I would like to pursue a legal action against the FBI due to their continuous harassment, and attempts to set me up,” al-Akili wrote in the March 9, 2012 email.

What no one knew — not even the FBI — was that Cabral and Sutcliffe began filming al-Akili’s side of things after he sent the email, which a lawyer who received it happened to forward to them. The documentary then becomes a house of mirrors, with each side of the FBI’s counterterrorism operation being reflected onto the other, revealing a mash-up of damaged people being exploited by overzealous government agents, with no sign at all of anything resembling terrorism or impending danger to the public.

“I felt I was almost obligated to expose these guys,” al-Akili told the filmmakers.

(T)ERROR becomes an intense spy game that plays out on screen, with each person double-crossing someone: Torres lying to and attempting to set up al-Akili for the FBI, and Cabral and Sutcliffe, in turn, turning the tables on the very subject of their film by approaching the subject of his investigation.

Cabral and Sutcliffe were even there when the FBI arrested al-Akili — not for terrorism but for having posed for a picture, in 2010, holding a rifle at a gun range. Since al-Akili had two previous felony drug convictions, he’d committed a crime by holding that gun. At his bond hearing, an FBI agent said Al-Akili had told informants that he wanted to join the Taliban in Pakistan. Al-Akili is now serving eight years in prison.

Near the end of (T)ERROR, Torres looks back on his work with the FBI agents in Pittsburgh.

“I told ’em,” Torres recalls. “I said, ‘I’m not here to entrap nobody.’ They’re trying to make me force this dude into saying something to support terrorism. I said, ‘This dude is not a fucking terrorist, man. He’s not even a pseudo-terrorist. He’s nothing but an oxymoron.’”

(T)ERROR would be disturbing enough if the case it followed were an isolated one. But it’s not. The announcement of a FBI sting like the one that targeted Khalifah al-Akili happens almost weekly now.

Pope’s genocide comments spark indifference, frustration among Turks

April 13, 2015

by Tuvan Gumruku and Ece Toksabay

Reuters

ANKARA/IZMIR |- When Pope Francis became the first pontiff to publicly call the 1915 Armenian massacre a genocide this weekend, the reaction from Ankara was swift and irate: it summoned the Vatican ambassador for a dressing down and recalled its own envoy.

Reaction in the Turkish media on Monday ranged from indignant to indifferent, depending on how close the newspaper is to the government. The response on Turkish street corners was muted, with many Turks dismissing the spat as empty politics and voicing a desire to leave history in the past.

Francis sparked the diplomatic row on Sunday by calling the massacre of up to 1.5 million Armenians “the first genocide of the 20th century”, prompting Turkey to accuse him of inciting hatred.

Muslim Turkey agrees that Christian Armenians died in clashes with Ottoman soldiers beginning in April 1915, when some Armenians lived in the empire ruled from Istanbul, but denies hundreds of thousands were killed and that this amounted to genocide.

“The pope’s statements, which are far from historical and judicial facts, cannot be accepted,” Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Twitter. “Religious offices are not places to incite hatred and revenge with baseless accusations.”

The fact that Vatican City is the world’s smallest state may have precluded further repercussions. When France’s parliament voted in 2011 to make Armenian genocide denial a crime, Turkey withdrew its ambassador, suspended joint military maneuvers and stopped political contacts for a while.

Sitting on a ferry off the western port of Izmir, a man who declined to give his full name said it was time to stop bickering about the past.

“Every year, it’s the same thing. April comes and all the Western politicians are talking about genocide. There is no such animosity between the people of these two countries,” said Ibrahim, 48, taking a sip of tea. “We must leave history behind us and focus on the future.”

Armenia and its large diaspora in the United States argue that Turkey has not fully owned up to its wartime past.

“If you ask any ordinary Armenian or Turk, I am positive we do not care about this as much as people think we do,” said Dursun Okan, a 27-year-old banker.

Still others saw the pope’s remarks as interference by foreigners and wondered whether the United States, a traditional ally of Turkey, would eventually use the word “genocide”.

Unlike almost two dozen European and South American states that use the term, Washington avoids it and has warned legislators that Ankara could cut off military cooperation if they voted to adopt it.

“I believe Obama will call it a genocide as well, considering the influence of the Armenian population in the United States,” said Serhat, a university student in Ankara. “It would surprise me if no one else called it a genocide.”

Pope Francis appeared to refer to his use of the term “genocide” on Monday, saying in a sermon that “today the Church’s message is one of the path of frankness, the path of Christian courage.”

(Writing by David Dolan; Editing by Tom Heneghan)

Turkey cannot accept Armenian genocide label, says Erdoğan

President says any decision by European parliament qualifying 1915 killings as genocide would go ‘in one ear and out from the other’

April 15, 2015

The Guardian/ Agence France-Presse in Ankara

Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has said Turkey will ignore any decision by the European parliament qualifying the 1915 killings of Armenians in the first world war as genocide, saying such recognition would go “in one ear and out from the other”.

The European parliament is due to vote on Wednesday on a “motion for resolution on the commemoration of the centennial of the Armenian genocide”.

“Whatever decision the European parliament makes today would go in one ear and out from the other because it is not possible for Turkey to accept such a sin or crime,” Erdoğan told reporters at an Ankara airport before leaving for Kazakhstan.

“I don’t know right now what sort of decision they will make … but I barely understand why we, as the nation, as well as print and visual media, stand in defence. I personally don’t bother about a defence because we don’t carry a stain or a shadow like genocide.”

After Pope Francis used the word “genocide” at the weekend to describe the killings of Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman empire in Turkey, Erdoğan summoned the Vatican’s ambassador in Ankara and recalled the Turkish envoy to the Holy See in a show of protest.

On Tuesday the US called for a “full, frank” acknowledgement of the mass killings while shying away from calling it a genocide.

Armenia and Armenians in the diaspora say 1.5 million of their forefathers were killed by Ottoman forces in a targeted campaign to eradicate the Armenian people from Anatolia, in what is now eastern Turkey.

Turkey takes a sharply different view, saying hundreds of thousands of both Turks and Armenians lost their lives as Ottoman forces battled the Russian empire for control of eastern Anatolia during the first world war.

Erdoğan said there were 100,000 Armenian citizens working in Turkey, some illegally. “We could have deported them but we did not. We’re still hosting them in our country. It is not possible to understand such a stance against a country which displays hospitality,” he said.

Turkey is also still home to a small Turkish-Armenian community, mostly based in Istanbul, who number about 60,000.

Armenians around the world will commemorate the 100th anniversary of the tragedy on 24 April, the same day as Turkey is planning commemorations of the first world war battle of Gallipoli.

The term Armenian Holocaust (also known as the Armenian Massacre) refers to the deportation and murder of Armenians by the Young Turks government in 1915-1916.

The Armenian Holocaust is not agreed to by everyone; the term “holocaust” generally defines a state-sponsored extermination plan but it is the position of Turkey and some academics that the majority of losses were a result of clashes between the two-sides, and causes such as famine and disease claiming the lives of all Ottomans. Armenians and other academics state at least 1.5 million Armenians perished in Turkey. France is among the countries which have officially recognized the Armenian Holocaust. One of the prime sources of information regarding the Armenian Holocaust is U.S. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau to Turkey from 1913-1916. Ambassador Morgenthau published a book in 1919 entitled Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story which details the atrocities committed against the Armenians by the Turks. Others are aware Morgenthau was not a neutral observer, anxious to get the United States into war, and primed by Armenian assistants; frequently cited as an “eyewitness,” the diplomat never left Istanbul and revealed his racism with statements describing the Turks variously as “inarticulate, ignorant, and poverty-ridden slaves,” “barbarous,” “brutal,” “ragged and unkempt,” (within his book) and as having “inferior blood.”

First Armenian Massacres

In 1890 there were possibly around 1.3 million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, of whom the vast majority were of the Armenian Orthodox or Roman Catholic Christian faith. Until late 19th century, the Armenians were called “millet-i sadika” (fidel nation) by the Ottomans, as they were living in harmony with the muslim Kurds and Turks in Eastern Anatolia, without any major conflict with the central authority despite religous and ethnic differences. While the Armenian population in Eastern Anatolia was large and clustered, there was also a considerably large community of Armenians on the west, mostly living in the capital city of Istanbul, of which a substantial community remains to this day.

In the 1890s, apparently in an attempt to gain international attention, Armenian revolution seized the Headquarters of the Ottoman Bank in Istanbul. Mobs mostly of Muslim Turks are then alleged by some to have killed 50,000 Armenians. The level of Ottoman government involvement with the mobs is not well known and debatable.

Armenian-sympathizing estimates of the total killed run from 100,000 to 300,000; one of the greatest pro-Armenians, Johannes Lepsius, estimated less than 89,000. Some felt differently, such as British Captain C. B. Norman who wrote (The Armenians Unmasked) that “only five lives were lost” in a town (Berecik) where 2,000 Armenians were supposed to have been murdered,” further adding “none of these (massacre) stories have been corroborated by a single European eye-witness.”

Turkish estimates run from 20,000 to 30,000. These events are recalled by the Armenians as the “Great Massacres” and believe the Hamidian measures verified the capacity of the Turkish state to carry out a systematic policy of murder and plunder against a minority population. Others are aware there would have been no valid reason to massacre Armenians who were allowed to prosper for centuries and of the formation of Armenian revolutionary groups beginning roughly around the end of the Russo-Turkish War of 1878. As some diplomats observed, the aim of these groups were to commit massacres so as to incite counter-measures, and to invite “foreign powers to intervene,” as Istanbul’s British Ambassador Sir Philip Currie observed in March 1894. 5,000 Turks were massacred by Armenian terrorist activities.

The Armenian Holocaust

Before World War I the Ottoman Empire came under the Young Turks government. At first some Armenian political organizations supported the Young Turks in hopes that there would be a real change from Abdul Hamid’s policies towards the Armenian population. There were Armenians elected to the Ottoman Parliament, where some remained throughout the ensuing world war. However they were later to be disappointed. Other parliamentarians such as Muradyan and Garo would go on to lead Armenian rebels in ethnic cleansing campaigns against Muslim and Jewish Ottoman villagers. The Young Turks feared the Armenian community, which they had believed was more sympathetic to allied powers (specifically Russia) than to the Ottoman Empire.

In 1914 Ottomans passed a new law that required all adult males up to age 45, to either be recruited in the Ottoman army or pay special fees in order to be excluded from service. Most of the Armenian recruits were later turned into road laborers and the executed. Those who escaped joined the Russians on the east.

In early 1915, simultaneously with a disastrous Ottoman defeat at the hands of Russia at Sarikamish, with the loss of over 80% of a huge military force, battalions of Russian Armenians organized the recruiting of Turkish Armenians from behind the Turkish lines. In response the Young Turk government executed 300 Armenian nationalist intellectuals, although a partisan source as Peter Balakian’s “The Burning Tigris” tells us most were imprisoned and there were even survivors. The fact that most Armenian men were also butchered in the army and many influential figures arrested and killed, places a question mark over certain arguments that Armenians organized revolts and that there was a civil war, given that Armenians were outnumbered, outmanned and outgunned. On the other hand, there were articles in the New York Times as early as November 7, 1914, days after Russia had declared war, attesting to Armenian uprisings (“ARMENIANS FIGHTING TURKS — Besieging Van—Others operating in Turkish Army’s Rear”), and accounts from Armenians themselves, such as Boghos Nubar’s 1919 letter in the Times of London stressing Armenian belligerence. In addition, there is evidence of Russian financial support, testimony from even those such as Ambassador Henry Morgenthau to the effect of “…In the early part of 1915… every Turkish city contained thousands of Armenians who had been trained as soldiers and who were supplied with rifles, pistols, and other weapons of defense,” and even accounts from Armenian newspapers hailing the rebellion. Chronology here is important and not incontestably established.

After the recruitment of most men and the arrests of certain intellectuals, widespread massacres were taking place throughout Ottoman Empire. In desperate attempts at survival, upon hearing of massacres of nearby villages, Armenians in Musa Dagh and Van organized their self defense. In Van, they handed over control of the city to advancing Russians. After waves of massacres and countermassacres, the Ottoman government ordered the deportation of over 1 million Armenians living in Anatolia to Syria and Mesopotamia though this figure has not been conclusively established. Indeed, there is another consensus this number did not exceed 700,000, and Arnold Toynbee reported in his Wellington House (British propaganda division) report of “The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire” that 500,000 were alive in 1916. Although the word deportation seems pretty innocent (some would prefer the word “relocation,” as the former means banishment outside a country’s borders; Japanese-Americans, for example, were not “deported” during WWII), things were not, because the deportations themselves were a silent method of mass execution that led to the death of many of the Armenian population, by forcing them to march endlessly through desert, without food or water or enough protection from local Kurdish or Turkish bandits.

In the process several hundred thousand died in the resulting death marches from starvation, dehydration, disease or exhaustion. Several hundred thousands more were massacred by Kurdish militia and Ottoman gendarmes (while other gendarmes gave up their lives defending the Armenians), giving an estimated total under certain counts of 1,500,000 Armenians dead. Then again, the Armenians contend one million survived, and even the Patriarch Ormanian provided a pre-war population figure of 1,579,000. Sympathetic sources as Le Figaro, prompted by Armenian terrorism in 1977 France, figured only 15,000 Armenians as having died from shootings, sickness and deprivation on the march. It also must be borne in mind that of the 2.5-3 million Turkish mortality, many succumbed to the same factors as famine and disease.

Mr. Hovhannes Katchaznouni, first Prime Minister of the Independent Armenian Republic, describes this part of history as follows in his 1923 Manifesto: “At the beginning of the Fall of 1914 when Turkey had not yet entered the war but already been making preparations, Armenian revolutionary bands began to be formed in Transcaucasia with great enthusiasm and especially with much uproar… The Armenian Revolutionary Federation had active participation in the formation of the bands and their future military action against Turkey… In the Fall of 1914 Armenian volunteer band organized themselves and fought against the Turks because they could not refrain themselves from fighting. This was an inevitable result of psychology on which the Armenian people had nourished itself during an entire generation; that mentality should have found its expression and did so….The Winter of 1914 and Spring of 1915 were the periods of greatest enthusiasm and hope for all Armenians in the Caucasus including of course the Dashnaktsutiun. We had no doubt the war would end with the complete victory of the Allies; Turkey would be defeated and dismembered and its Armenian population would be liberated. We had embraced Russia wholeheartedly without any compunction. Without any positive basis of fact we believed that the Tzarist government would grant us a more-or-less broad self-government in the Caucasus and in the Armenian vilayets liberated from Turkey as a reward for our loyalty, our efforts and assistance. ”

Statistics of the Second Massacre

Statistics regarding the number of Armenians living in Ottoman Anatolia and the number killed are disputed. The lowest numbers are given by Turkish sources and the highest by Armenian sources.

In 1896 the Ottoman government recorded 1,144,000 Armenians living in Anatolia. Professor Justin McCarthy, U.S. historian and expert in Ottoman history, whose books are published by a Turkish organization as well as prestigious university presses such as the Oxford University Press, estimated that there were 1,500,000 Armenians in Anatolia in 1912. According to the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople, there were between 1,845,000 and 2,100,000 Armenians in Anatolia in 1914. Estimates range from 1,000,000 given by some Turkish sources to more than 3,500,000 given by some Armenian sources. Arnold J. Toynbee, who served as an intelligence officer during World War I, estimates there were 1,800,000 Armenians living in Anatolia in 1914. Encyclopaedia Britannica took 1,750,000 Armenians living in Anatolia as their estimate, in certain later editions. In 1911, the encyclopedia had figured 1.1 million, and Toynbee estimated less than one million in his 1915 book, “Nationalism and the War,” before his services were enlisted in Wellington House.

Estimates for the numbers of Armenians who died during the Second Massacre vary even more. Some Turkish sources claim that 200,000 Armenians died, whereas some Armenian sources number the dead at well over 2,000,000. Talat Pasha, a prominent Young Turk and Grand Vizier from 1917-1918, claimed that the total was 300,000. Toynbee put the number at 600,000 in his 1916 “Treatment” propaganda report. McCarthy independently arrived at the same figure.

Later assessments

Armenians around the world recognize April 24 as marking the start of holocaust at the hands of the Young Turks.

Turkish historians and foreign Ottoman history scholars deny that an event classifiable as state-organised holocaust occurred, because there has been no evidence of Ottoman state involvement . Instead, it is claimed that many of the Armenian deaths resulted from armed conflict, civil-war, disease and famine during the turmoil of World War I, when Armenian citizens of Ottoman Empire joined Russian armies to invade eastern provinces of Ottoman Empire. In the same period, 2.5 million other Ottoman citizens have perished as a result of civil-war and disease.

It is undisputed that many opponents of the Armenian view of history have been threatened by Armenian groups, with a wave of assassinations and terrorist actions initiated in the 1970s and 1980s by such groups as the internationally recognized notorious ASALA terrorist organization and the so-called Justiciers of the Armenian Holocaust. Furthermore, United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio sentenced Armenian activist and former chairman of the Armenian National Commitee of America, Mourad Topalian, to 37 months of imprisonment for two counts of terrorism-linked federal crimes. Specifically, Topalian was convicted of storing over one hundred pounds of high explosives and possessing machine guns.

The Armenian Holocaust is the subject of a 2002 film by Armenian-Canadian director Atom Egoyan, Ararat.

The American rock band System of a Down, whose members are Armenian in ancestry, wrote the song P.L.U.C.K. (Political Lying Unholy Cowardly Killers), about the Armenian Holocaust and its denial as holocaust.

On April 21, 2004, the Canadian House of Commons voted to officially recognize and condemn the Armenian Holocaust. The motion passed easily by 153 to 68, however, the Liberal-controlled Cabinet was instructed to vote against it. The federal government, in opposing the motion, did not express a position on whether the holocaust took place, but rather cited a desire to avoid reopening old wounds and to maintain good relations with Turkey.

In the past, many prominent American politicians have made statements in support of formal recognition of the Armenian holocaust. While president Ronald Reagan publicly referred to the events of 1915 as a ‘holocaust’, a major feat in and of itself, nonetheless to this day no formal resolution recognizing the holocaust has been passed by the US government. The Armenian side speculates that fear of retribution from Turkey, a US ally and NATO partner, is behind the lack of formal recognition, whereas the Turkish side speculates that the only reason for the possibility of such a recognition would be the strength of

On April 24, 2004, in marking the 89th Anniversary of the holocaust, John Kerry issued a statement calling for international recognition of the Armenian Holocaust.

President Bill Clinton issued a news release on April 24, 1994, to commemorate the “tragedy” that befell the Armenians in 1915, yet he bowed to political pressure and refused to refer to it as “holocaust.”

Also breaking a campaign promise, the subsequent President George W. Bush did not acknowledge the Armenian holocaust in 2001, due to extreme pressure from Turkey.

Currently, only a few countries officially recognize the Armenian Holocaust, which include Argentina, Canada, France, Greece, Russia, Slovakia [1], Sweden, Switzerland, Uruguay and Vatican City. Many US states and cities also recognize the Armenian Holocaust. Recently Sweden has changed its official position quoting the historical accuracy, and currently does not recognize Armenian holocaust.

Certain countires, notable for their involvement in the affairs of the Ottoman Empire at this time and with substantial archival evidence of first rate importance, refuse to legislate recognitions of any deliberate, state-planned holocaust. A major example is that of the UK, whose lawyers were eager to try alleged Ottoman War Criminals on the charge of crimes against humanity after the war (a policy announced during the war), but who released the accused on discovering that there was no conclusively safe evidence in British, Ottoman or American archives that could establish a sound verdict of guilt.

The Turkish government, in their new 2004 Penal Code, added a penalty of ten years in prison for any person that confirms that the Armenian Holocaust took place. [2] The U.K. Parliament suggests, however, that “There is no mention of … the Armenian holocaust” in this penal code.

Armenian Holocaust memorial

The idea of the memorial arose in 1965, at the commemorating of the 50th anniversary of the holocaust. Two years later the memorial (by architects Kalashian and Mkrtchyan) was completed at the Tsitsernakaberd hill above the Hrazdan gorge in Yerevan. The 44 metre stele symbolizes the national rebirth of Armenians. 12 slabs postioned into a circle, represent 12 lost provinces in present day Turkey. In the centre of the circle, in depth of 1.5 metres, there is an eternal flame. Along the park at the memorial there is a 100 metre wall with names of towns and villages where masacres are known to have taken place. In 1995 a small circular museum was opened at the other end of the park where one learn about basic information about the events in 1915. Some photos taken by German photographers (Turkish allies during World War I) and some publications about the holocaust are also displayed. Near the museum is a spot where foreign statesmen plant trees in memory of the holocaust.

Each April 24th (Armenian Holocaust Commemoration Holiday) hundreds of thousands of people walk to the holocaust monument and lay flowers (usually red carnations or tulips) around the eternal flame. Armenians around the world mark the holocaust in different ways, and many memorials have been built in Armenian Diaspora communities.

Reproduced below are official telegrams allegedly despatched by Turkish Minister of the Interior Talaat Pasha authorising ongoing massacre of Armenians from March 1915 onwards. All were purportedly signed by Talaat himself other than the first. The first telegram is signed by the “Djemiet”, i.e. the executive committee of the ‘Young Turk’ organisation; given that Talaat was himself chairman of the organisation the telegram was necessarily issued with his authorisation.

Note that the authenticity of the telegrams has long been debated, dismissed as clear propaganda fakes by many and regarded as genuine by others. Talaat himself strenuously denied writing the telegrams.

The duty of everyone is to effect on the broadest lines possible the realization of the noble project of wiping out of existence the well-known elements who for centuries have been the barrier to the empire’s progress in civilization.

We must, therefore, take upon ourselves the entire responsibility, pledging ourselves to this action no matter what happens, and always remembering how great is the sacrifice which the Government has made in entering the World War. We must work so that the means used may lead to the desired end.

In our dispatch dated February 18th, we announced that the Djemiet has decided to uproot and annihilate the different forces which for centuries have been a hindrance; for this purpose it is forced to resort to very bloody methods. Certainly the contemplation of these methods horrified us, but the Djemiet saw no other way of insuring the stability of its work.

Ali Riza [Note: the committee delegate at Aleppo] harshly criticised us and urged that we be merciful; such simplicity is nothing short of stupidity. We will find a place for all those who will not cooperate with us, a place that will wring their delicate heartstrings.

Again let me remind you of the question of property left. This is very important. Watch its distribution with vigilance; always examine the accounts and the use made of the proceeds.

THE DJEMIET

September 3rd, 1915

To the Prefecture of Aleppo:

We advise that you include the woman and children also in the orders which have been previously prescribed as to be applied to the males of the intended persons. Select employees of confidence for these duties.

Minister of the Interior, TALAAT.

September 16th 1915

To the Prefecture of Aleppo:

You have already been advised that the Government, by order of the Djemiet, has decided to destroy completely all the indicated persons [Armenians] living in Turkey.

All who oppose this decision and command cannot remain on the official staff of the empire.

Their existence must come to an end, however tragic the means may be; and no regard must be paid to either age or sex, or to conscientious scruples.

Minister of the Interior, TALAAT.

November 18th, 1915

To the Prefecture of Aleppo:

It appears, from the interventions which have recently been made by the American Ambassador [Note: Mr. Morgenthau] at Constantinople on behalf of his Government, that the American Consuls are obtaining information by some secret means. They remain unconvinced, despite our assurance that the deportations will be accomplished in safety and comfort.

Be careful that events which attract attention shall not occur in connection with those who are near cities and other centres. In view of our present policy, it is most important that foreigners who are in those parts shall be convinced that the expulsion of the Armenians is in reality only deportation.

Therefore it is necessary that a show of gentle dealing shall be made for a while, and the usual measures be taken in suitable places.

All persons who have given information to the contrary shall be arrested and handed over to the military authorities for trial by court-martial. This order is recommended as very important.

TALAAT.

December 11th, 1915

To the Prefecture of Aleppo:

We are informed that some correspondents of Armenian journals are acquiring photographs and letters which depict tragic events, and these they give to the American Consul at Aleppo.

Dangerous people of this kind must be arrested and suppressed.

Minister of the Interior,

TALAAT.

December 29th, 1915

To the Prefecture of Aleppo:

We are informed that foreign officers are finding along the roads the corpses of the indicated persons, and are photographing them.

Have these corpses buried at once and do not allow them to be left near the roads.

This order is recommended as very important.

Minister of the Interior,

TALAAT.

January 15th, 1916

To the Government of Aleppo:

We are informed that certain orphanages which have opened also admitted the children of the Armenians.

Should this be done through ignorance of our real purpose, or because of contempt of it, the Government will view the feeding of such children or any effort to prolong their lives as an act completely opposite to its purpose, since it regards the survival of these children as detrimental.

I recommend the orphanages not to receive such children; and no attempts are to be made to establish special orphanages for them.

Minister of the Interior,

TALAAT.

(Undated.)

From the Ministry of the Interior to the Governor of Aleppo:

Only those orphans who cannot remember the terrors to which their parents have been subjected must be collected and kept.

One of the main subjects that the “Turkish thesis” insists upon in discussions of the events of 1915, is the exaggeration of the number of slain people in Armenian circles. How many people died or were actually murdered? In a world, where Generals responsible of the murder of 7,000 people in Bosnia were sued for having committed the crime of holocaust, this is a very weird argument. In addition, those taking part in this argument don’t seem to be aware of the simple reality that the 1948 definition of holocaust by the United Nations doesn’t consider the principle of “killing” as a necessary condition. That’s why claiming that the number of casualties is from 50,000 to 600,000, rather than 1 to 1.5 million, has no importance, and for this reason [this claim] is not taken seriously. It’s perceived and interpreted as an indication of the panic of being guilty. This is a reality that our people don’t see and don’t want to see. What we need to know is that all the numbers given about Armenians – dead or alive – are conjectural, including in the first place the number of 600,000 given by A. Toynbee in the year 1916 when deportations and deaths still continued. The only official statistics were provided by the Ottoman Government after the war. After the fall of the Union and Progress party from power, one of the first tasks of the newly formed cabinet was to investigate this matter. In December 1918, a Commission was formed upon the initiative of the Interior Minister Mustafa Arif (Deymer). The Commission worked about 3 months, and the conclusions were made public by the Interior Minister of that time, Cemal Bey, on 14 March 1919. According to the Ottoman State Archives, the number of Armenians slain during the period 1914-1918 is 800,000 (Vakit, Alemdar, Ikdam, 15 March 1919). The fact that during the deportations and killings 800,000 Armenians lost their lives is a well-known and repeated fact by everybody during an entire period of time. At the head of people using that figure is Mustafa Kemal [Atatürk]: Mustafa Kemal said during a meeting with the American General Harbord that 800,000 Armenians were killed. (Memories of Rauf Orbay, “Our Recent History”, Vol. 3, Pg, 179)

How Should the Turks be Punished?

Concerning this subject, the second source is a book published in 1928 by the General Staff about the losses of World War I. The book, published by Lieutenant-Colonel Nihat, is the translation of a French book, and the figures related with Turkey are provided after modification and correction. According to the numbers given by the General Staff “800,000 Armenians and 200,000 Greeks died because of massacres and deportations, or in labor battalions” during the First World War. Y. H. Bayur, who transmits this information, says that “these figures should also be considered correct by our official sources”. (Y. H. Bayur, The History of Reforms, Vol. III, Part IV, pg. 787). It may look amazing, but the reality that what happened in 1915 was a mass murder was accepted by everybody having lived in that period, and was never the object of an argument. Of course the word soykirim [holocaust] (being a term belonging to the post World War II period) was not used in those days. To describe what had happened in 1915, words such as “katliam” [massacre], “taktil” [killings], “teb’id” [taking away, expulsion, expelling], “kital” [massacre] were used. Mustafa Kemal has dozens of speeches in which he defines the treatments reserved to Armenians as “cowardice”, or “barbarity”, and names these treatments “massacre”. In September 1919, the American General Harbord, who visited Mustafa Kemal in Sivas, says “he, too, disapproved the Armenian Massacre.” According to Mustafa Kemal, “the massacre and deportation of Armenians was the work of a small committee who had seized the power” (see the above mentioned work of Rauf Orbay.) Again during the same period, in an interview given to the USA Radio Newspaper, he says, “we have no expansionist plan…we can give the guarantee that there will be no new barbaric deeds against Armenians.” (Bilal Simsir, British Documents on Atatürk, Vol. I, pg. 171, Ankara 1973) In a telegram sent to Kazim Karabekir on 6 May 1920, he directs Kazim Karabekir to abstain from any initiative, meaning a new “Armenian Massacre”. (Kazim Karabekir, Our War of Liberation, pg. 707) In a speech made on 24 April, he describes the treatments reserved to Armenians in 1915 as “cowardly”. (Atatürk’s speeches in public and secret sessions of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey, vol. I, pg. 59), etc.

Not only there was no argument of the fact that the treatments of Armenians was a massacre, on the contrary it was openly defended that the guilty persons should be punished. There were a series of correspondences between the Cabinet of Ali Riza Pasha and Mustafa Kemal in September 1919. The War Minister Cemal conducting the correspondence on behalf of the Istanbul Government required that Mustafa Kemal make a declaration stating “the perpetrators of all sorts of crimes committed during the war will not avoid legal punishments.” In his reply, Mustafa Kemal says, “our most special desires are the exposure and punishment of misgovernment during the war, to understand that in our fatherland the responsibility is shared equally by the ordinary people and the leaders alike, as well as to understand that the era of law has started in an impartial manner and with justice”. He adds that he considers “more appropriate and useful” that this punishment “be shown to friends and enemies by putting it into practice, rather than be made of publications on paper in the advertisement style, which would lead to many arguments”. That is, the punishments expected by Mustafa Kemal were not to be left on paper for advertising purposes, but they were in the form of concrete actions. (Speech, Vol. III, Documents, Document 141-2, pg. 164-6) The trial of those guilty of massacres was also discussed in the deliberations of Amasya. During the deliberations, decisions were made about five protocols, three of them being public and two being secret. In the first protocol dated 21 October 1919, the punishment of the criminals was considered in two separate articles: “1- The resurgence of the Unionism, of the idea of the Union and Progress, and even the appearance of certain signs of it are politically harmful. 4- It’s judicially and politically necessary to legally punish those who committed crimes during the deportations”. The third protocol was about the elections which would take place, and the necessity of hindering the participation in the elections of those unionists sought for because of their participation in the Armenian Massacre was agreed upon. For this reason, Anatolia reserved itself the right to intervene in the elections and it is said “The presence at the Delegation of Deputees, to be convened, of those whose personalities and Unionism are connected with their wicked acts, and those sullied with issues of deportations, massacres, and other wicked acts incompatible with the real interests of the nation and country, is unacceptable and that presence must be hindered by all possible means.” (Speech, Vol. III, Document 159-160, pg. 193-4)

It is possible to quote examples over several pages. What I want to explain is the following: the fact that what happened in 1915 was a mass murder was not even the subject of an argument in any manner from the viewpoint of the actors of that period, with Mustafa Kemal at their head. The main discussion of that period was organized around the axis of the deliberations of Paris, and it was about how the “Turks” should be punished for the Armenian Massacre. To put the criminals on trial was one form of punishment. Another form was the partition of Anatolia. That is, the Western Powers were hiding their imperial ambitions mainly behind the reality of Armenians having been killed. Mustafa Kemal and his friends accepted the reality that those responsible of the massacre should be punished, but opposed that this punishment be in the form of the partition of Anatolia. Today, rather than producing lies and legends, if we make the position of Mustafa Kemal on this subject our departure point, and continue our discussion from there, we shall have covered a fairly long distance.

1875 December 1 By order of the Turkish government, the Armenian market district at Van is destroyed by fire with great loss to Armenian property, goods, and businesses.

1878 Russia victorious in Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878. Russo-Turkish Treaty of San Stefano (February 19, 1878) provides for protection and reforms for Armenians. Great Britain negotiates a secret Cyprus Convention with Turkey (June 1978) to allow British to establish bases on Cyprus and to administer Cyprus. In return, Britain insists Russo-Turkish issues be decided, instead, by an international conference. The resulting Congress of Berlin (June 1978) replaces the protective measures of San Stefano under Article 16 with unsatisfactory and ineffective provisions for Armenian people under Article 61, and returns Garin (Erzerum) to Turkey. Russia retains Kars and Ardahan.

1879 Armenian performances are forbidden in Constantinople. The urban Armenian population of Garin and Arabkir come out against the government.

1880 August By special order of the Turkish government, the word “Armenia” is forbidden for use in official documents.

1884 June Armenians “rebel” in Zeitun against oppressive Turkish taxes.

1891 January The Armenians of Vardenis in Taron are robbed by Turks and their village is destroyed.

1893 Sultan Abdul Hamid II, known as the Bloody Sultan, suspends the Armenian National Constitution, and also discontinues the national parliament in Constantinople, which includes some Armenian representatives.

1894 August 20-27 Sassun’s Gelie-guzan village massacre, known as the “Gelie-guzan Hole Carnage” takes place. Here, Turks inaugurate the system of slaughtering unarmed people, which later was the prototype for Hitler’s concentration camps.

1894 August 25-30 Sassun’s Gebin Mount carnage is inflicted when the Turkish army manages to force Armenian women, children and old men to leave Andok for the forest on the bottom of mountain. The army ignites the forest and burns the Armenians alive. Note: This is a harbinger of the extermination of future victims by burning them alive in stables and other large storage facilities.

1894 August 10,000 Armenians are killed and 74 Armenian villages are destroyed in Sassun.

1894 August-October Armenians refuse to pay illegal taxes to Kurdish irregular forces in Sassun. Unrest in the vilayet of Bitlis, near Mush. Revolt in Sassun. Attempted uprising against Kurdish oppression is followed by massacres in Sassun. A joint report published on July 28, 1895 by the Commission of Inquiry created by the initiative of the Great Powers, estimates the number of victims at 5,000.

1895 May 11 Governments of six countries present the Turkish Sultan Abdul Hamid II a special note describing the disastrous conditions of Armenia and demand the Turkish government to carry out improvements.

1895 August Joint memorandum presented by Britain, France and Russia to the Sultan, pointing out the disastrous situation in the Armenian provinces and urging him to proceed with the reforms. The Imperial Turkish Government replies in August 1895 and promises to carry out the reforms specified in Article 61 of the Treaty of Berlin (1978).

1895 September 30 Carnage of Armenians in Baberd at the hands of the Turks.

1895 September 30, October In the Bab Ali section of Constantinople, Armenians carry out a peaceful demonstration. The Turks set upon killing Armenians. 2000 Armenians die. Protests by the Great Powers by joint note from three ambassadors (French, British and Russian) on October 13-15 demand reforms. On October 31 a decree is issued, providing for reforms.

1895 October 5 Mass obliteration of Armenians takes place in Trebizond and its villages. Armenians of Sassun share the same fate.

1895 October 7 Armenians of Derjan province are slaughtered by the Turks.

1895 October 8 Massacres of Armenians by Turks begin in the vilayet of Trebizond as confirmed by the report of Gillieres, the French Consul in Trebizond.

1895October 9 The carnage of Armenians at Erzingan and Kamakh by the Turks.

1895 October 10 In Kghi province more than 1000 Armenians are killed, and dozens of villages destroyed. In Bitlis, 102 villages are destroyed. On the same day the carnage of Armenians at Charsanjak and in its villages begins, taking almost 700 lives. In Balu, the body count of Armenian victims reaches 1200, Arabkir – 2800, Torgom – 500

1895 October 13 Most of the Armenians in Baghesh are killed by the Turks.

1895 October 16 Urfa in Yedesia is attacked and in spite of persistent defense, the Turkish army and the Turkish mob succeed in slaying around 10,000 Armenians. On the same day, the Turks inflict similiar carnage in Shapin-Garahisar. 2000 Armenians are slain in the town and 3000 in 30 villages.

1895 October 21 The Armenian population in Erzingan, a town of Erzerum vilayet, is slaughtered by the Turks. 1000 Armenians are killed.

1895 October 23 3000 Armenians of Malatia are killed. 1000 houses are burned.

1895 October 25 Massacres follow in Bitlis, in the vilayet of Bitlis.

1895 October 26 Almost the entire Armenian population of Kharput is slaughtered by the Turks. The body count exceeds 4000. Mass massacres take place in Bayburd, vilayet of Erzerum. 165 villages are destroyed.

1895 October 27-28 Massacres in Urfa, vilayet of Aleppo, the first by the Hamidie Kurdish regiments organized by the Turks for this purpose, confirmed by the report of the British consul, Fitzmaurice, dated March 16, 1896.

1895 October 30 Massacres in Erzerum, vilayet of Erzerum. 400 killed by the Turkish mob and soldiers.

1895 October 31 Massacres occur in Garin and in the vilayet of Erzerum. Around 2000 Armenians are killed; 43 villages are destroyed.

1895October Organized massacres of Armenians by Turks in Constantinople and Trebizond.

1895 November 1 Diarbekir carnage begins. 1000 Armenians are killed in the town and 30,000 more in the villages. 119 villages are destroyed. Massacres in Arabkir, vilayet of Kharput. 2,800 dead. Massacres in Diarbekir, vilayet of Diarbekir. Confirmed by a telegram of Meyrier, the French consul in Diarbekir, sent on November 3 to P. Cambon, the French ambassador in Constantinople. He estimates incorrectly: 5000 dead. 119 villages are pillaged and set on fire.

1895 November 3 Almost the whole Armenian population in Marzvan, around 700 people, are killed by the Turks.

1895 November 4 3,800 killed in the vilayet of Kharput by the Turks.

1895 November 10 Systematic Turkish army attacks on Van take place. The city of Van, in the vilayet of Van, is attacked by the Turkish Hamidie forces. Forced conversions to Islam in Kharput, vilayet of Kharput.

1895 November 11 Turkish army attacks the town of Balu, in the vilayet of Kharput. It results in 1680 Armenian deaths. Turkey proclaims a holy war (Djihad).

1895 November 12 Turks kill 1,500 Armenians in the vilayet of Sivas, and an equal number in Gurun.

1895 November 15-17 Armies of Sultan destroy Aintab in the vilayet of Aleppo and kill 1500 Armenians.

1895 November 18-20 160 villages around the city of Van are robbed and pillaged.

1895 November 28 In Zklus, 200 Armenians are killed; in Amasia, 100; and in Aleppo, 1000.

1895 December Armenians of the villages of Norduz, Hayots Dzor, Gavash and Karchevan in the vilayet of Bitlis are set upon by fire and sword. 100 villages are destroyed. On December 28 in the town of Ourfa (Yedesia), 8000 Armenians are slaughtered. 100 villages around Mush, vilayet of Bitlis, are destroyed.

1895 December 28 A battalion of Turkish-led Hamidie forces, proceeding from Aleppo, encircles the town of Urfa. Massacres on the following day kill 8,000 Armenians. This is confirmed by the above-mentioned report of the British consul, Fitzmaurice, dated March 16, 1896, as well as by the French consul.

Global Estimates Most of the figures mentioned through 1895 come to a total of 150,000 to 300,000 dead, to which must be added some 150,000 forced conversions and some 100,000 emigrants forced to flee. The report written by the agents of the European Powers estimate 28,000 killed just in the localities where representatives of foreign nations were present.

1896June 8-15 The population of Van and nearby villages is destroyed. The major Armenian population of Sgherdi is decimated and survivors are forcibly converted to Islam. In 40 villages of Khizan, 400 people, and in 20 villages of Mamrzank 160 people are slain, and the others are converted to Islam forcibly. All Armenian villages of Shatakh are devastated and turned to ruins. 11 villages of Gyumushkhane are destroyed and most of their population slain.

1896 Middle of June Turks break their vow and near St. Bartholemew Church, attack Armenians in Van seeking to defend themselves, murdering 1500 people. The survivors flee to Persia.

1896 August 26 A group of Armenian militants of the Dashnak Party occupies the Ottoman Bank in Constantinople in order to gain the attention of foreign powers to the oppression of the Armenians. Achieving their purpose, they leave the bank in the evening and are picked up by boat and taken to France. Much attention is aroused in the Western capitals. However, this action results in a massacre in Constantinople, on August 27, killing approximately 7,000 Armenian victims.

1896 August 28 Representatives of the Great Powers send a telegram of protest to the Ottoman authorities.

1896 September 2 Armenian population of Agn is destroyed. Half the houses in the city are burned. Joint verbal note of protest issued by the Great Powers, accusing the Sublime Porte directly.

1896 September 3 In the city of Mush and its villages, 250 Armenians are killed by the Turks.

1894-1896 300,000 Armenians become the victims of the carnages inflicted by the Turks. In addition, almost as many flee the country.

1900 August Mothers and children are cut down by sword in Sassun’s Spaghanak villages by sudden attacks late at night.

1904 May 7500 Armenians are slain in Sassun by the Turks.

1908 April 14 Violent outbreaks in Adana (in Cilicia) and in near-by towns, in an attempted counter-revolution by Turks supporting the Sultan. They are soon squelched.

1908 July Military coup in Salonica by the Young Turk movement (the Union and Progress Party). There begins a brief period of collaboration among Turks, Armenians and other minorities. The subsequent massacres in Adana do not shake this new-found cooperation.

1908 J uly 24 The Ottoman Constitution is proclaimed.

1909 April 15-25 30,000 Armenians are slaughtered in Adana, Tarsus and other towns of Cilicia. The Turkish army bears direct responsibility, but the Armenian community is willing to consider it as an isolated incident, and to continue to trust the Young Turks until further events prove otherwise.

1913 January 29 In Turkey, the triumvirate of Enver, Talaat and Jemal Pasha heads the government.

1914 February 8 Under the combined influence of Russia and Great Britain, the Turkish authorities sign the Armenian Reform Project and agree to take certain measures in favor of the Armenian population.The Dutch, Westemeck, and the Norwegian, Hoft, are appointed as General Inspectors of the Armenian provinces, but they are rendered ineffective. The promised measures are not implemented.

1914- beginning of 1915 The Armenian Patriarchate in Constantinople estimates the Armenian population in Turkey at 2,100,000. World War I begins July 1914. Loyally, the Armenians participate in the war effort. Mobilization of the entire population, including Armenians, is decreed and the Armenians of Turkey take part in the war on the Caucasian and Western fronts. Immediately preceding the war, the Armenian population is neutral because a number of Armenians in Russia is mobilized on the Russian side, and a natural desire to avoid a fratricidal war. Some Armenian presence in the Russian Army will become an argument used by the Turkish authorities in their attempt to justify the measures they took later to destroy the Armenian people.

1915 January Enver is disastrously defeated in Sarikamish at the hands of Russian troops, marking a failure of his Pan-Turanian plans. The Turkish authorities decree the demobilization and disarmament of the Armenians. The Armenians are grouped into small work battalions used for garbage details and similar tasks. The Armenian soldiers in the Turkish army, under the pretext of work details, are marched and killed in cold blood or used for target practice.

1915 January 13 A.F. Kerensky, a member of the National Council of Russia and later briefly to be the leader of Russia, in a report, describes the astounding plight of Armenian refugees. He declares that when the Turkish attacks on Russian territory began, rivers of Armenian refugees stretched to the North… “That was not an escape, it was the great demise of a whole nation”.

1915 February 13 Two Armenian deputies of the Ottoman Assembly submit a note concerning the massacres and executions of several such battalions.

1915 February 26 War Minister Enver convenes 75 top ranking Ittihadists. This secret meeting finalizes the details of the plan to carry out a holocaust of the Armenians. Evidence indicates that the decision to carry out the Holocaust was made some years earlier.

1915 April 8 The process of removing the Armenian population of Zeitun commences. Taking advantage of the defense staged by a group of young Armenians, the Turkish army invades Zeitun, with the assistance of local Turks, to re-establish control. The mass deportation and massacres of Armenian inhabitants of the entire region is immediately organized. This mountainous region had always preserved a quasi-autonomy.

1915 April 15 Talaat, Enver and Nazem send a secret order to the local governments for the removal and extermination of Armenians in Turkey.

1915 April 15-18 While the Armenian population of Van is fleeing to Russia because of the evacuation of the Russian army, the Turkish forces attack villages of the vilayet. They destroy 80 villages and slay 24,000 Armenians in the vilayet and city of Van. The Turks accuse the Armenians of collaboration with the Russian troops.

1915 April 20 At the news of the massacres, the mostly Armenian population of Van takes to the barricades. The Turkish authorities will also use this incident on the Caucasian front and the resistance of the Armenians as a pretext to justify the measures of deportation (and massacre) they are about to inflict.

1915 April 20- May 19 The remaining Armenians of Van try to defend themselves from the overwhelming Turkish forces.

1915 April 24 800 Armenian leaders, writers and intellectuals are arrested in Constantinople and murdered. The barbaric Armenian holocaust begins. This is a most important date for all Armenians today. It represents the date for commemorating the Armenian Holocaust each year throughout the world.

1915 April 27-30 The forced removal and deportation of Dyurt Yol’s Armenian population begins.

1915 May 15 Turkish forces begin the process of removal and deportation of the Armenian population from villages in the vilayet of Erzerum.

1915 May 16 Law of May 16, 1915 is enacted with “instructions pertaining to property and real estate abandoned by the deported Armenians, consequences of the war and unusual political circumstances”. This law provides for the installation of Turkish refugees in the homes and on the lands belonging to the Armenians.

1915 May 24 The governments of England, France and Russia jointly warn the Turkish government publicly that “They will hold personally responsible… all members of the Ottoman government and those of their agents who are implicated in such massacres”. This is the first time in the international arena three large countries publicly characterize the Turkish actions against Armenians as crimes against “humanity and civilization” for which “personal responsibility is laid on every member of the Turkish government who participated in the carnages”. The communique of the Allied Powers of the Entente, published by the Havas news agency, accuses the Ottoman Turkish government directly for the massacres against the Armenian population.

1915 May 27 The law of May 27, 1915 is enacted concerning the “displacement of suspected persons.” This law empowers army officers to relocate populations upon the simple suspicion of treason or for military reasons.

1915 June 1 12,000 Armenian soldiers in the Turkish army are massacred in Balu, vilayet of Diarbekir.

1915 J une 10 A supplementary law is enacted regarding reporting property of deportees. See entry under September 26 as to supplementary law adopted September 26, 1915.

1915 June 12 – July 3 Turkish armies slay or remove Armenians of Shapin Garahisar, who tried to defend themselves.

1915 June 15 21 leaders of the Hnchukyan Party are hanged publicly in Constantinople.

1915 June 24 Massacres and deportations of the inhabitants of Shabin Karahissar begin.

1915 June 25 The removal and deportation of the Armenians of the city of Sivas begin.

1915 June 26 The removal of the Armenian population of Kharput and Trebizond vilayets are commenced by the Turkish army. Photocopy of the original deportation order (written in old Turkish with Arabic characters) is to be found in the Archives of the United States State Department in Washington, DC.

1915 June 27 Mass removals and deportations of Armenians begin in Samsun.

1915 July 1 Assyrians and Armenians are deported from Medzpin (Nisibe), Tel-Ermen (Hill of the Armenians), Bitlis, vilayet of Bitlis, Mardin and surrounding regions.

1915 July 3 The massacre begins of the Armenian population of Mush, Sassun and Bitlis vilayets begins.

1915 July 10 The Armenian population of Malatia is deported.

1915 July 13 Self-defense of Musa mountain begins. The heroic band of Armenians is later vividly depicted in the best-selling novel “Forty Days of Musa Dagh” by Franz Werfel.

1915 July 27 The Armenian population of Cilicia and Antioch is deported.

1915 July 28 The removal of the Armenian population of the Cilician cities, Aintab and Qilise, is carried out. In Great Britain’s House of Lords, in answer to Viscount James Bryce’s question concerning the slaughter of Christians in Armenia, the president of the Military Council, Lord Grew declares that the information received by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs shows that the Turkish crimes are increasing both in numbers and in violence. Lord Grew declares that “all those mass carnages and violent removals are engaged under the pretext of forced transmigration”.

1915 July 29 Deportations begin from Aintab and Kilisse, in Cilicia.

1915 July 30 Deportations begin from Suedia, in Cilicia.

1915 August 16Deportations begin from Marash in Cilicia and Konia in western Asia Minor.

1915August 19 Removal and deportation begin of Armenian population of Urfa in Yedesia.

1915 September 15 Turkey’s Minister of Interior, Talaat Pasha, cables to the Aleppo Prefecture the confirmation of the previously transmitted order for removal of Armenians and their final elimination. The original of this cable is reproduced in the book of A. Andonian “The Memoirs of Naim Bey (The Holocaust of the Armenians by the Turks). With a New Preface by the Armenian Historical Association”, Documentary Series, Vol. I, Great Britain, Reprint 1964, 83 pp. Exhibit No. 3 at the trial of Soghomon Tehlirian, authenticated by the German Court. (At a trial before a Berlin court in 1921, following the assassination of Talaat by Tehlirian, Tehlirian was acquitted by the Court because of the circumstances.)

1915 September 15 Rashid, Governor of Diarbekir, sends cable to Talaat, the Minister of the Interior, announcing that the number of Armenians “expelled” from Diarbekir has reached 120,000.

1915 September 26 “Provisional law concerning the property, debts and receivables of persons relocated elsewhere” is adopted. This law provides for the liquidation of debts and receivables of displaced persons (Armenians). A special commission is “charged” with holding the proceeds of sales in escrow. The German Foreign Office summarized this law as compressed to provide “1. All goods of the Armenians are confiscated. 2. The governments will cash in the credits of the deportees and will repay (will not repay) their debts”.

1915 September 30 and October 7 In Bern, Switzerland, at its Central Hall, public meetings are held deploring the ongoing Armenian tragedy.

1915 October 110 famous German and Italian civilians in Switzerland, including scientists, journalists and public figures publish “The Call” both in French and German, in defense of the Armenian people.

Note As in Switzerland, in many other places all over the world, there were many, many public meetings of protest and countless public statements by various heads of state and other officials condemning the Turkish massacres and deportations of the Armenians, threatening the Turks responsible with appropriate punishment and promising justice and territorial and/or monetary restitution for the Armenians. The statements and meetings referred to in this chronology are but a tiny sample.

1915 October 6 In Great Britain’s House of Lords, Lord James Bryce denounces the Turkish murderous campaign against the Armenians. He declares the time has passed when any harm could be caused by public statements and the more complete the statements, the more good it may bring, because it remains the only chance of preventing these carnages from continuing, if they are not over yet. It is a pity, he says, that his information from several sources indicates that the number of victims is very large. It is considered to be 800,000 as of then. He states that there is no commandment in Islam that can justify such slaughters. He urges every effort be made to send help for the poor, wretched survivors, hundreds of which are dying of starvation and disease. “That is all that we can do now in England and let us do it and do it swiftly”.

1915October 12In Great Britain’s House of Commons, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Edward Grey declares “All the information concerning the carnages of Armenians in Turkey became public. Only two feelings can describe it – horror and disturbance.”

1915 November 16 As the government spokesman for questions from members of the House of Commons, Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs, Lord R. Cecil declares that Turkey intended not to punish the Armenian race, but to destroy it. That was the only goal.

1915 November 18 In Paris at the “American Club”, a public meeting urges help to alleviate the Armenian suffering.

1915 December 12 Talaat, Minister of the Interior, sends a telegram to the Prefecture of Aleppo. He states that in view of the rather compassionate attitude of certain valis with respect to orphans, the order is given that the orphans be sent away with the caravans, with the exception of the very young ones unable to remember the atrocities. The original cable is reproduced in said Andonian’s book “The Memoirs of Naim Bey (The Holocaust of the Armenians by the Turks)”.

1916 January 11 In Germany’s Reichstag, deputy Karl Libknecht, an international socialist figure, directs a question to the Vice Chancellor, as to whether he is aware that in Turkey, their ally, thousands of Armenian citizens have been removed from their homes and exterminated. He demands that the German government forbid the Turks from further terrifying actions against the remaining Armenian population.

1916 February 9 The United States Senate votes (with the concurrence of the House of Representatives) to ask the President of the United States of America to set a special day when citizens of this country can help Armenians with financial support, considering that many of them, being in the country that was at war, were forced to leave their houses and belongings without any opportunity to care even for their primal needs, are afflicted with hunger, disease and untold sufferings. President Wilson designates August 21 and August 22 for making contributions for the suffering Armenians.

1916 February 9 In the Russian Duma, Minister of Foreign Affairs S.D. Sazonov declares “I have mentioned before about the awful sufferings of that wretched race. Under the tacit assent of its ally, Germany, the Turks hoped to bring alive their desire to exterminate the entire Armenian race…”

1916 March 7 Talaat, Minister of the Interior, sends a cable to the Aleppo Prefecture, ordering the extermination of children at military installations.

1916 April 9 “Homage to Armenia” gathering takes place in Paris’ Sorbonne University, attracting thousands of people. Speaking at that gathering, France’s Minister of Education declares that “For more than a year carnages paint Armenia red in blood and have surpassed other crimes in scale and in violence. Germany can be proud of its horrid deeds”. At the same program, the opening words of the president of the National Council of France, Paul Deshnanel, firmly condemns the slaughter of Armenians at the hands of the Turkish executioners.

1916 July 29 “France-Armenia” company is formed in Paris, members of which are ministers of the French government, senators, deputies, Georges Clemenceau, writer Anatole France and other dignitaries.

1916 August 19 Decree abolishes the national Armenian constitution of 1863, in violation of Article 61 of the Treaty of Berlin concerning religious freedom.

1916 November 16 In Berlin’s Missionary Union, Doctor Karl Accenfeld sends a statement to the German Chancellor Bettman-Holveg in which he asserts “In neutral countries large accusations are spreading against Germany about not only calmly watching, but also helping to realize the extinction of a whole Christian race”. Note: In the bibliography in this web-site is listed a volume by Dadrian dealing with the German involvement.

1917 January 1 By a special decree/law the government of Turkey condemns the 1978 Treaty of Berlin and especially Article 61.

1917 March 29 In Stockholm, a large meeting takes place dedicated to repudiation of the mass murder of Armenians. The members of the meeting deplore the insensitivity of Sweden towards Armenians.

1917 November 6 In Great Britain’s House of Commons, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Arthur Balfour declares “Do we need to ignore that Armenia should be given back, as respected gentlemen wish to give it back with their formula, under the reign of Turkey. I don’t want to ruin the Turkish community – consisting of Turks, in Turkish fitting style, commanding the Turks. No, our constant goal is the emancipation of non-Turks from Turkish governance. What is imperialistic in wishing to see Poland independent, Armenia liberated from Turks, Alsace Lorraine rejoined to France, to see Italy having its own population, language, area and civilization”.

1917 December 4 Speaking in the Congress of the United States, President Wilson states “We hope to provide the right and opportunity for people living in the Turkish Empire to make their lives safe and their fate secure from aggression and injustice, orders of foreign courts and parties.

1918 January 6 In the name of the “Germano – Armenian community”, Paul Rorbach, Edward Kir and Martin Rade urge the government of Germany to promote autonomy for Armenia.

1918 January 8 President Wilson’s Declaration of Fourteen Points is published. The 12th Point extends promise to the Armenians of security of life and an unmolested opportunity for autonomous development.

1918 March Treaty of Brest-Litovsk is signed between Russia and Turkey after Russia’s withdrawal brought about by the Russian Revolution. Turkish invasion of Russian Armenia causes more killings of Armenians including those fleeing from Turkish Armenia. Fighting continues on the Caucasian front involving Armenian units.

1918 May 28 The Armenian National Council, of necessity to fill a vacuum, announces itself the supreme and only administrative body for the comparatively small remaining territory in what was Russian Armenia. Such words as “independence” or “republic” are intentionally avoided pending the outcome of a nearby battle with the invading Turkish forces (which the Armenians do win).

1918 June 4 In Batum, the Treaty of Peace and Friendship is signed between Ottoman Turkey and the Republic of Armenia, proclaiming, hollowly, peace and eternal friendship. It provided, among other terms, detailed provisions dealing with conduct at or near their common boundary.

1918 mid-October United States Congressman Edward Little presents a resolution to the Congress advocating that the “Armenian people have the right to be free and independent, have an outlet to the sea and be the masters of the Christian culture for which their sons had been sacrificed”.

1918 October 30 The armistice of Moudros ends the war between the Allies and Turkey. Global estimates of the campaign of extermination: close to 1,500,000 Armenians dead.

1918 November Defeated Turkey recognizes the small Armenian Republic whose territory consists only of a small fraction of former Armenian lands. Turkey also cedes to it the vilayets of Kars and Ardahan the following year. This transfer proves to be only temporary.

1918 November 13 In Great Britain’s House of Lords, James Bryce, speaking about Armenia and Cilicia, severely criticizes the Turkish government. He states in part: “As Your Highness and Lords already know, the present Turkish government includes people that were involved in the astonishing carnages (that happened in 1915). Every respected Lord that wants to refresh his memory can read the Blue Book published by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1916, in which you’ll find the description of the awful massacres that are written in history everywhere, in spite of all the attempts not to allow or justify them. Not only is Talaat Pasha in the group of criminals that created the Union and Progress Committee, but also others who still are active in the present Turkish government must take the responsibility for those carnages”.

1918 December 10 United States Senator Henry Cabot Lodge presented a proposal for the Senate to express the view that Armenia, including the six vilayets in Turkey and Cilicia should be independent and the peace conference should help Armenia to create an independent republic. While Lodge was very sympathetic to the Armenian cause, he later opposed the United States accepting a mandate of Armenia to avoid possible military involvement.

1919 January 8 By the order of Sultan Mahmed VI it was ordered that the First, Second and Third Military Tribunals prosecute criminally the leaders of the “Young Turks” and other implicated members of the government.

1919 April 8 A Military Tribunal finds a number of Turkish leaders guilty of carnages in the Yozkhat area. The Court finds that Kemal Bey ordered the Moslems of the area to eliminate all the Armenian population, and sentences him to death.

1919 April 27 In Constantinople, the trial begins of members of the Union and Progress Party, and other leaders of the Turkish government. The trial continues until June 26, 1919.

1919 May 22 The special Military Court tries the organizers of deportations and slaughter in Trebizond and punishes eight as criminals.

1919 May 28 By secret order of the British Military Government, 77 Turkish criminals are transferred from a prison at Constantinople to Malta and their convictions are expunged.

1919 June 25 In the name of the the Supreme Allied Council, Georges Clemenceau declares at the Peace Conference that Turkey officially has accepted guilt for the Armenian massacres.

1919 July 5 Following the trial of the Unionists (these were the members of the Union and Progress Committee, in power since 1909), Talaat Pasha, Enver Pasha, Djemal Pasha and Dr. Nazim “are adjudged to be the principal criminals and their guilt has been decided by unanimous vote”. All four are sentenced to death in absentia. It is to be noted that this trial took place during the period Constantinople was occupied by the Allied armies.

1919 October 17 The Supreme Council of the Allies, at the San Remo Conference, proposes that the United States accept a mandate over Armenia.

1920 January 13 and for months following Various other trials take place in Constantinople and a number of Turkish officials and Young Turks are convicted and sentenced to death for their involvement in the crimes against the Armenian people.

1920 February French forces in post-war occupation of Cilicia unexpectedly withdraw. Turks take advantage of the opportunity and kill 30,000 Armenians.

1920 May 24 The President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, asks the Congress to give him the right to accept a mandate over Armenia and send troops there. Ultimately, the United States decides not to accept a mandate because of the inherent risks, even though still widely sympathetic to the Armenian cause.

1920 August 10 The Treaty of Sevres, signed by Turkey, Britain, France, Italy, Japan, Armenia, Belgium, Greece, Lebanon, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbian-Croatian-Slovenic Republic and Czechoslovakia, recognizes the Armenian Republic and ordains that the borders between Turkey and Armenia in the vilayets of Erzerum, Trebizond, Van and Bitlis be determined by President Wilson. According to the peace agreement, Turkey accepts its responsibility for the crimes against the Armenians during the war and undertakes the obligation to compensate for the losses sustained by the Armenians. It also agrees to hand over to the Allies the persons responsible for the massacres. President Wilson appoints a commision which sets the boundaries of a much expanded Armenia, including significant seacoast, but all to naught. The Treaty of Sevres is never carried out. It was repudiated by Turkey and eventually replaced by the Treaty of Lausanne, which had no provisions dealing with Armenia.

1921 May 16 The independent Armenian Republic, in existence since May 28, 1918, is tranformed into the Soviet Socialist Republic of Armenia.

1922 September Kemal Ataturk’s forces seize and set fire to the city of Smyrna and engage in a rampage, killing Greeks and Armenians. 150,000 perish.

1923 April 25 Unrepentant Turkey enacts the law of “abandoned property” which provides for the confiscation of all property abandoned by Armenians absent from the country, regardless of the date, reason or conditions of their departure.

1923 July 24 The Treaty of Lausanne is signed by the new Republic of Turkey and the Great Powers. The Treaty recognizes full Turkish sovereignty over all its territory, and contains no provisions about Armenia. Winston Churchill has written: “In the Treaty of Lausanne, which re-establishes peace between Turkey and the Allies, history will search in vain for the word Armenia”.

1923 September Turkey adopts a law which prohibits the return of Armenians who left Cilicia or any of the eastern vilayets whether or not they had left voluntarily.

Armenian massacres

The killing of large numbers of Armenians who lived within the Ottoman Empire and its successor Turkish state in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From 1915 to 1920, more than a million Armenians died as the result of executions, massacres, starvation, and other repressive measures, and many fled to the United States and other countries.

Armenian Holocaust

The Armenian Holocaust (also known as the Armenian Massacre) is a term which refer to the forced mass evacuation and related deaths of hundreds of thousands or over a million Armenians, during the government of Young Turks from 1915 to 1917. Several facts in connection with what is called the Holocaust, is a matter of ongoing dispute between parts of the international community and Turkey. Although it is generally agreed that the events said to comprise the Armenian Holocaust did occur, the Turkish government reject that it was holocaust, on the alleged basis that the deaths among the Armenians, was not a result of a state-sponsored plan of mass extermination.

Despite this theses, most Armenian, Western, and some Turkish scholars believe that the Amernian Holocaust was in fact a case of what is termed holocaust. For example, most Western sources point to the sheer scale of the death toll, maintaining that there were probably a million or more deaths. What is referred to as the Armenian Holocaust is the second-most studied case of holocaust, and often draws comparison with the Holocaust. A growing list of countries, as discussed below, have officially recognized and accepted the authenticy of the Armenian Holocaust.

Armenians in Anatolia

In 1914, before World War I, there were an estimated two million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, the vast majority of whom were of the Armenian Apostolic, with a small number of the Armenian Catholic and Protestant faiths. Until the late 19th century, the Armenians were referred to as millet-i sadika (loyal nation) by the Ottomans, as it is said they were living in harmony with other ethnic groups across the Empire without any major conflict with the central authority — this despite religious and ethnic differences and the Christian Armenians being subject to Islamic dhimmi laws, which gave them fewer legal rights than Muslims. While the Armenian population in Eastern Anatolia was large and clustered, there was also a considerable community of Armenians in the West, most of whom lived in the capital city of Istanbul, where a substantial community remains to this day. The communities in Eastern Anatolia suffered the heaviest human losses. As a result of the massacres, thousands of Armenians fled to independent and semi-independent muslim countries such as Egypt, Lebanon and Iran in what is known as the “Armenian Exodus”. There are still large Armenian communities/minorities in these countries today.

Before the holocaust

During the second half of the 19th century, along with the other minority groups of Anatolia such as Greeks and Bulgarians, Armenians started embracing nationalism. Despite pressure on the sultan Abdul Hamid by Western European countries about the Armenian Question, massacres only increased: according to Western accounts, 100,000 to 300,000 Armenians were killed within the Empire between 1894 and 1897.

Before World War I, the Ottoman Empire came under the government of the Young Turks. At first some Armenian political organizations supported the Young Turks, in hopes that there would be a significant change due to a variety of Abdul Hamid’s policies towards the general and the Armenian population. In this respect, many Armenians were elected to the Ottoman Parliament, where some remained throughout World War I.

In 1914, the Ottoman government passed a new law to support the war effort that required all enabled adult males up to the age of forty-five to either be recruited in the Ottoman army or to pay special fees in order to be excluded from service which would still be used in the war effort. By this law, most able-bodied men were removed from their homes, leaving only the women, children, and elderly by themselves. Most of the Armenian recruits were later turned into road laborers, and many were executed.

Following the Ottoman Empire’s entry into World War I, Imperial Russia invaded Eastern Anatolia, where the Armenian and Muslim communities were interleaved. Taking advantage of common religion and the recent discomfort of the Armenian community in the Ottoman Empire, Russia promoted Armenian nationalism, and there were many Russian-Armenians in the Russian army. At the same time, some Armenians had begun advocating an independent state.

Starved Armenian children

On April 24 1915, the Young Turk government arrested several hundred – or, according to Turkish records, over two thousand – Armenian intellectuals. It is believed that most of these were soon executed. This was quickly followed by orders for the forced evacuation of hundreds of thousands – possibly over a million – Armenians from across all of Anatolia (except parts of the western coast) to Mesopotamia and what is today Syria. Many went to the Der El Zor Desert. Most historians believe that the government did not provide any facilities to care for the Armenians during their evacuation, nor when they arrived. Rather, records suggest that the Ottoman troops escorting the Armenians as a matter of course not only allowed others to rob, kill, and rape the Armenians, but often participated in this activity themselves. The forseeable consequence was a significant number of human losses. Most Western sources maintain that a million or over Armenians lost their lives as a result.

After the recruitment of most men and the arrests of certain intellectuals, widespread massacres have been reported taking place throughout the Ottoman Empire. In Van, it is said that the governor Djevdet ordered irregulars to commit crimes and force the Armenians to rebel to justify the encircling of the town by the Ottoman army. The Ottoman government ordered the evacuation or deportation of many Armenians living in Anatolia to Syria and Mesopotamia. It is believed that over a million were deported, though this figure has not been conclusively established. The word “deportation” could be considered as misleading (and some would prefer the word “relocation”, as the former means banishment outside a country’s borders; it is said that Japanese-Americans, for example, were not “deported” during World War II). Some historians believe that the deportations were, in practice, a method of mass execution which led to the deaths of many of the Armenian population by forcing them to march endlessly through desert, without food or water or enough protection from local Kurdish or Turkish bandits, and members of the special organization were charged to escort the convoys (which meant their destruction).

Armenians hanged in Aleppo, 1915

The Ottoman Empire set up a recorded twenty-five to twenty-six of what are often called major “concentration camps” (Deir-Zor, Ras Ul-Ain, Bonzanti, Mamoura, Intili, Islahiye, Radjo, Katma, Karlik, Azaz, Akhterim, Mounboudji, Bab, Tefridje, Lale, Meskene, Sebil, Dipsi, Abouharar, Hamam, Sebka, Marat, Souvar, Hama, Homs and Kahdem), under the command of Şükrü Kaya, one of the right hands of Talat Pasha. The majority of the camps were situated near the Iraqi and Syrian frontiers, and some were only temporary transit camps. Other camps were only used as temporary mass burial zones—such as Radjo, Katma, and Azaz—that were closed in Fall 1915. After reports of deaths, the camps Lale, Tefridje, Dipsi, Del-El, and Ras Ul-Ain were built specifically for those who had a life expectancy of a few days. The majority of the guards inside the camps were Armenians.

Even though nearly all the camps, including all the major ones, were open air, according to records, some were not. Other camps existed, according to the military court, that were irregular Red Crescent camps used to kill by morphine injection (two Saib (health inspector) colleagues, Dr. Ragib and Dr. Vehib, testified during the court) and from which bodies were thrown into the Black Sea. In other instances, according to records, there were some small-scale killing and burning camps where the Armenian population was told to present itself in a given area, and was subsequently burned en masse. Other records from the military tribunal suggest that gassing installations existed as well. Other tribunal testimonies put forth that Dr. Saib and Nail, an Ittihadist deputy, were heading two school buildings used as extermination camps for children. Both Saib and Nail were allegedly in charge of providing the list of children who were to be distributed among the Muslim populace; the rest of the children were to be sent to the mezzanine floor to be killed by a mass gassing installation. The children were sent there under the pretext of taking baths but were poisoned instead.

While the total number of victims that perished in all such camps is hard to establish, it is estimated by some sources at close to a million. This excludes Armenians who may have died in other ways, but may include the special organizations’ participation in the events; the majority of the excluded losses are recorded in Bitlis and Sivas.

The special organization (Teshkilati Mahsusa)

While there was an official special organization founded in December 1911 by the Ottoman government, the second organization that participated in what led to the destruction of the Ottoman Armenian community was founded by the lttihad ve Terraki. It technically appeared in July 1914 and was supposed to differ from the existing organization in one important point; according to the military court and other records, it was meant to be a “government in a government” (without needing any orders to act). Later in 1914, the Ottoman government decided to influence the direction the special organization was to take by releasing criminals from central prisons to be the central elements of this newly formed special organization. According to the Ottoman commissions attached to the tribunal (for example the Mzhar commision in Sivas) as soon as November 1914, 124 criminals were released from Pimian prison. Many other releases followed; in Ankara a few months later, 49 criminals were released from its central prison. Little by little from the end of 1914 to the beginning of 1915, hundreds, then thousands of prisoners were freed to form the members of this organization. Later they were charged to escort the convoys of Armenian deportees. Vehib, commander of the Ottoman third army, called those members of the special organization, the “butchers of the human specy.” This organization was led by the Central Committee Members Doctor Nazim, Behaeddin Sakir, Atif Riza, and former Director of Public Security Aziz Bey. The headquarters of Behaeddin Sakir were in Erzurum, from where he directed the forces of the Eastern vilayets. Aziz, Atif and Nazim Beys operated in Istanbul, and their decisions were approved and implemented by Cevat Bey, the Military Governor of Istanbul.

Armenians killed during the Armenian holocaust

According to the same commissions and other records, the criminals were chosen by a process of selection. They had to be ruthless butchers to be selected as a member of the special organization. The Mazhar commission, during the military court, has provided some lists of those criminals. In one instance, of 65 criminals released, 50 were in prison for murder. The lists all gave a disproportionate ratio of those condemned for murder; others imprisoned for minor crimes constituted a clear minority. This selection process of criminals was, according to most Western researchers, clearly indicative of the government’s intention to commit mass murder of its Armenian population. It must also be noted that, according to records, physicians participated in the process of selection; health professionals were appointed by the war ministry to determine whether the selected convicts would be fit to apply the degree of savagery of killing that was required.

It is estimated that the members of the special organization have killed hundreds of thousands of Armenians.

Military trials, Istanbul, 1919

Many of those responsible for the holocaust were sentenced to death in absentia, after having escaped their trials in 1918. The accused succeeded in destroying the majority of the documents, that could be used as evidence against them, before they escaped. The martial court established the will of the Ittheadists to eliminate the Armenians physically, via its special organization. The Court Martial, Istanbul, 1919: “The Court Martial taking into consideration the above-named crimes declares, unanimously, the culpability as principle factors of these crimes the fugitives Talat Pasha, former Grand Vizir, Enver Efendi, former War Minister, struck off the register of the Imperial Army, Cemal Efendi, former Navy Minister, struck off too from the Imperial Army, and Dr. Nazim Efendi, former Minister of Education, members of the General Council of the Union & Progress, representing the moral person of that party;… the Court Martial pronounces, in accordance with said stipulations of the Law the death penalty against Talat, Enver, Cemal, and Dr. Nazim.”

]]>0adminhttp://www.tbrnews.org/?p=9822015-04-02T17:18:38Z2015-04-02T17:18:38ZThe Voice of the White House

Washington, D.C. April 1, 2015: “The naughty Putin’s invasion of the Ukranie with twelve tank armies and a lelgion of militant Russian Girl Scouts has dropped completely off the Internet to be replaced with the story of the suicidal German pilot.

Of course the pouting and posturing of our President didn’t move Putin at all and there was no invasion of the Ukraine, this having been invented out of whole cloth by their fraudster president.

This reminds me of the fictional “German Guy” who said Paul Wolfowitz had just nuked Houston some years ago or the hilarious stories about Tesla death rays or bomb-laden pigeons bringing down the WTC.

There are many credulous persons who actually believe such stories but then there are more who believe Jesus walked on water and got the rotting dead to jump up out of their graves and dance around the room.

The facts are bad enough without larding things up like a back-wards patient deprived of his Prozac.”

Emergency alert’ sparks panic among TV viewers across US

March 31, 2015

RT

The residents of about a dozen US states received a scare when an ominous message rolled across their TV screens announcing an ‘emergency alert’ with the names of their states – without any explanation or further information.

A test of the Emergency Alert System (EAS) began shortly before noon on Monday and was seen by millions of television viewers in Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia and Washington, DC, Infowars reported.

EAS is a special department run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and the National Weather Service (NOAA/NWS).

The alert interrupted regularly scheduled television programs for 10 minutes with a listing of affected states and an announcement that the alert would remain in effect until midnight.

Operation Jade Helm, which is scheduled to kick off in July and run for eight weeks, will involve the participation of 1,200 troops in dozens of towns in Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Texas and Utah.

No information was available indicating that the emergency alert was connected to this upcoming military drill, where Americans were asked to provide information on ‘suspicious’ activity to the authorities.

Passphrases That You Can Memorize — But That Even the NSA Can’t Guess

March 26, 2015

by Micah Lee

The Intercept

It’s getting easier to secure your digital privacy. iPhones now encrypt a great deal of personal information; hard drives on Mac and Windows 8.1 computers are now automatically locked down; even Facebook, which made a fortune on open sharing, is providing end-to-end encryption in the chat tool WhatsApp. But none of this technology offers as much protection as you may think if you don’t know how to come up with a good passphrase.

A passphrase is like a password, but longer and more secure. In essence, it’s an encryption key that you memorize. Once you start caring more deeply about your privacy and improving your computer security habits, one of the first roadblocks you’ll run into is having to create a passphrase. You can’t secure much without one.

For example, when you encrypt your hard drive, a USB stick, or a document on your computer, the disk encryption is often only as strong as your passphrase. If you use a password database, or the password-saving feature in your web browser, you’ll want to set a strong master passphrase to protect them. If you want to encrypt your email with PGP, you protect your private key with a passphrase. In his first email to Laura Poitras, Edward Snowden wrote, “Please confirm that no one has ever had a copy of your private key and that it uses a strong passphrase. Assume your adversary is capable of one trillion guesses per second.”

In this post, I outline a simple way to come up with easy-to-memorize but very secure passphrases. It’s the latest entry in an ongoing series of stories offering solutions — partial and imperfect but useful solutions — to the many surveillance-related problems we aggressively report about here at The Intercept.

It turns out, coming up with a good passphrase by just thinking of one is incredibly hard, and if your adversary really is capable of one trillion guesses per second, you’ll probably do a bad job of it. If you use an entirely random sequence of characters it might be very secure, but it’s also agonizing to memorize (and honestly, a waste of brain power).

But luckily this usability/security trade-off doesn’t have to exist. There is a method for generating passphrases that are both impossible for even the most powerful attackers to guess, yet very possible for humans to memorize. The method is called Diceware, and it’s based on some simple math.

Your secret password trick probably isn’t very clever

People often pick some phrase from pop culture — favorite lyrics from a song or a favorite line from a movie or book — and slightly mangle it by changing some capitalization or adding some punctuation, or use the first letter of each word from this phrase. Some of these passphrases might seem good and entirely unguessable, but it’s easy to underestimate the capabilities of those invested in guessing passphrases.

Imagine your adversary has taken the lyrics from every song ever written, taken the scripts from every movie and TV show, taken the text from every book ever digitized and every page on Wikipedia, in every language, and used that as a basis for their guess list. Will your passphrase still survive?

If you created your passphrase by just trying to think of a good one, there’s a pretty high chance that it’s not good enough to stand up against the might of a spy agency. For example, you might come up with “To be or not to be/ THAT is the Question?” If so, I can guarantee that you are not the first person to use this slightly-mangled classic Shakespeare quote as your passphrase, and attackers know this.

The reason the Shakespeare quote sucks as a passphrase is that it lacks something called entropy. You can think of entropy as randomness, and it’s one of the most important concepts in cryptography. It turns out humans are a species of patterns, and they are incapable of doing anything in a truly random fashion.

Even if you don’t use a quote, but instead make up a phrase off the top of your head, your phrase will still be far from random because language is predictable. As one research paper on the topic states, “users aren’t able to choose phrases made of completely random words, but are influenced by the probability of a phrase occurring in natural language,” meaning that user-chosen passphrases don’t contain as much entropy as you think they might. Your brain tends to continue using common idioms and rules of grammar that reduce randomness. For example, it disproportionately decides to follow an adverb with a verb and vice versa, or, to cite one actual case from the aforementioned research paper, to put the word “fest” after the word “sausage.”

Passphrases that come from pop culture, facts about your life, or anything that comes directly from your mind are much weaker than passphrases that are imbued with actual entropy, collected from nature.

This short but enlightening video from Khan Academy’s free online cryptography class illustrates the point well.

Make a secure passphrase with Diceware

Once you’ve admitted that your old passphrases aren’t as secure as you imagined them to be, you’re ready for the “Diceware” technique.

First, grab a copy of the Diceware word list, which contains 7,776 English words — 37 pages for those of you printing at home. You’ll notice that next to each word is a five-digit number, with each digit being between 1 and 6. Here’s a small excerpt from the word list:

24456 eo

24461 ep

24462 epa

24463 epic

24464 epochNow grab some six-sided dice (yes, actual real physical dice), and roll them several times, writing down the numbers that you get. You’ll need a total of five dice rolls to come up with the first word in your passphrase. What you’re doing here is generating entropy, extracting true randomness from nature and turning it into numbers.

If you roll the number two, then four, then four again, then six, then three, and then look up in the Diceware word list 24463, you’ll see the word “epic”. That will be the first word in your passphrase. Now repeat. You want to come up with a seven-word passphrase if you’re worried about the NSA or Chinese spies someday trying to guess it (more on the logic behind this number below).

Using Diceware, you end up with passphrases that look like “cap liz donna demon self,” “bang vivo thread duct knob train,” and “brig alert rope welsh foss rang orb.” If you want a stronger passphrase you can use more words; if a weaker passphrase is OK for your purpose you can use less words.

How strong are Diceware passphrases?

The strength of a Diceword passphrase depends on how many words it contains. If you choose one word (out of a list of 7,776 words), an attacker has a one in 7,776 chance of guessing your word on the first try. To guess your word it will take an attacker at least one try, at most 7,776 tries, and on average 3,888 tries (because there’s a 50 percent chance that an attacker will guess your word by the time they are halfway through the word list).

But if you choose two words for your passphrase, the size of the list of possible passphrases increases exponentially. There’s still a one in 7,776 chance of guessing your first word correctly, but for each first word there’s also a one in 7,776 chance of guessing the second word correctly, and the attacker won’t know if the first word is correct without guessing the entire passphrase.

This means that with two words, there are 7,7762, or 60,466,176 different potential passphrases. On average, a two-word Diceware passphrase could be guessed after the first 30 million tries. And a five-word passphrase, which would have have 7,7765 possible passphrases, could be guessed after an average of 14 quintillion tries (a 14 with 18 zeroes).

The amount of uncertainty in a passphrase (or in an encryption key, or in any other type of information) is measured in bits of entropy. You can measure how secure your random passphrase is by how many bits of entropy it contains. Each word from the Diceware list is worth about 12.92 bits of entropy (because 212.92 is about 7,776). So if you choose seven words you’ll end up with a passphrase with about 90.5 bits of entropy (because 12.92 times seven is about 90.5).

In other words, if an attacker knows that you are using a seven-word Diceware passphrase, and they pick seven random words from the Diceware word list to guess, there is a one in 1,719,070,799,748,422,591,028,658,176 chance that they’ll pick your passphrase each try.

At one trillion guesses per second — per Edward Snowden’s January 2013 warning — it would take an average of 27 million years to guess this passphrase.

Not too bad for a passphrase like “bolt vat frisky fob land hazy rigid,” which is entirely possible for most people to memorize. Compare that to “d07;oj7MgLz’%v,” a random password that contains slightly less entropy than the seven-word Diceware passphrase but is significantly more difficult to memorize.

A five-word passphrase, in contrast, would be cracked in just under six months and a six-word passphrase would take 3,505 years, on average, at a trillion guesses a second. Keeping Moore’s Law in mind, computers are constantly getting more powerful, and before long one trillion guesses a second might start looking slow, so it’s good to give your passphrases some security breathing room.

With a system like this, it doesn’t matter at all that the word list you’re choosing from is public. It doesn’t even matter what the words in the list are (two-letter words are just as secure as six-letter words). All that matters is how long the list of words is and that each word on the list is unique. The probability of guessing a passphrase made of these randomly-chosen words gets exponentially smaller with each word you add, and using this fact it’s possible to make passphrases that can never be guessed.

Do I really have to use dice?

This is a longer discussion, but the short answer is: Using physical dice will give you a much stronger guarantee that nothing went wrong. But it’s time consuming and tedious, and using a computer to generate these random numbers is almost always good enough.

Unfortunately there doesn’t appear to be user-friendly software available to help people generate Diceware passphrases, only various command-line-only Diceware projects on GitHub, which power users can check out. Stay tuned for a future post about this.

How to memorize your crazy passphrase (without going crazy)

After you’ve generated your passphrase, the next step is to commit it to memory.

I recommend that you write your new passphrase down on a piece of paper and carry it with you for as long as you need. Each time you need to type it, try typing it from memory first, but look at the paper if you need to. Assuming you type it a couple times a day, it shouldn’t take more than two or three days before you no longer need the paper, at which point you should destroy it.

Typing your passphrase on a regular basis allows you to memorize it through a process known as spaced repetition, according to promising research into high-entropy passphrases.

Now that you know passphrases, here’s when to avoid them

Diceware passphrases are great for when you’re typing them into your computer to decrypt something locally, like your hard drive, your PGP secret key or your password database.

You don’t so much need them for logging into a website or something else on the Internet. In those situations, you get less benefit from using a high-entropy passphrase. Attackers will never be able to guess a trillion times per second if each guess requires communicating with a server on the Internet. In some cases, attackers will own or take over the remote server — in which case they can grab the passphrase as soon you log in and send it, regardless of how strong or weak it is cryptographically.

For logging in to websites and other servers, use a password database. I like KeePassX because it’s free, open source, cross-platform, and it never stores anything in the cloud. Then lock up all your passwords behind a master passphrase that you generate with Diceware. Use your password manager to generate and store a different random password for each website you login to.

How we use Diceware to protect our sources

At The Intercept we run a SecureDrop server, an open source whistleblower submission system, to make it simpler and more secure for anonymous sources to get in touch with us.

When a new source visits our SecureDrop website, they get assigned a code name made up of seven random words. After submitting messages or documents, they can use this code name to log back in and check for responses from our journalists.

Under the hood, this code name not only acts as the source’s encryption passphrase, but it’s also really just a passphrase generated using the Diceware method, but with a digital cryptographically secure random number generator, rather than rolling dice. SecureDrop’s dictionary is only 6,800 words long (the developers removed some words from the original word list that could be considered offensive), making each word worth about 12.73 bits of entropy. But this is still plenty enough to make it impossible for anyone to ever simply guess a source’s code name, unless they happen to have massive computational resources and several million years.

Simple, random passphrases, in other words, are just as good at protecting the next whistleblowing spy as they are at securing your laptop. It’s a shame that we live in a world where ordinary citizens need that level of protection, but as long as we do, the Diceware system makes it possible to get CIA-level protection without going through black ops training.

13 ways the NSA has spied on us

April 1, 2015

by Timothy B. Lee

MSN

Over the last couple of years, through the revelations of Ed Snowden and independent reporting by others, we’ve learned more and more about the National Security Agency’s spying programs. Indeed, there have now been so many revelations that it can be hard to keep them straight. So here’s a handy guide to the most significant ways the NSA spies on people in the United States and around the world.

1. The NSA collects every American’s phone records

This was one of the first programs revealed by Snowden and it continues to be one of the most controversial. The Patriot Act allows the NSA to obtain business records that are relevant to terrorist investigations. The government claims that this gives it the power to obtain records — phone number dialed, time and duration of call — about every domestic phone call in the United States. Last year the Obama administration proposed changes to require judicial oversight of access to the database.

2. The PRISM program lets the NSA access private user data on leading online services

A slide disclosed by Snowden lists 9 major internet companies — Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL, and Apple — as participating in the PRISM program. The program allows the NSA to get private information such as emails, Facebook messages, and stored documents. It’s not known how carefully these information requests are scrutinized.

3. The NSA engages in offensive hacking operations

Tailored Access Operations is the NSA’s elite hacking unit. While some other NSA programs collect information in bulk, TAO engages in targeted attacks on high-value targets. It is believed that the NSA has a large library of exploits, allowing it to hack into a wide variety of consumer gadgets and business IT systems.

4. The NSA taps long-distance internet connections

The NSA works with countries around the world to tap into underseas fiber optic cables carrying vast quantities of fiber optic data. There’s also evidence that the NSA has been tapping into fiber optic cables in the United States.

When you log into GMail, you’ll see a “lock” icon indicating that communications between your computer and Google’s server is protected by encryption. But until recently, Google didn’t employ encryption when it moved data between its own servers. The NSA tapped into these connections and harvested large quantities of user data. Yahoo was also targeted.

6. The NSA has spied on foreign leaders

Documents released by Snowden suggest that at least 35 world leaders have been targeted by the NSA, including Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff and Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto. There were also allegations last year that the NSA spied on German chancellor Angela Merkel, though a subsequent investigation cast doubt on that claim.

7. The NSA spies on millions of ordinary people overseas

The NSA tapped into communications systems in Brazil and Germany — and likely other countries as well — to collect information about ordinary peoples’ phone calls and emails.

8. The NSA has tracked cell phone locations around the worldThe NSA has spied on cell phone networks around the world, collecting 5 billion records per day about the locations of users’ cell phones. The agency isn’t allowed to deliberately target cell phone users in the United States, but some American cell phone records have been collected “incidentally.”

9. From 2001 to 2011, the NSA collected vast amounts of information about Americans’ internet usageIn 2001, the Bush administration began collecting data about Americans’ internet usage. The data collected included the sender and recipients of emails, as well as information about which websites a user browsed. The program operated for two years under President Obama but was shut down in 2011.

10. The NSA has undermined the security of encryption productsOver the last decade, the NSA has persuaded technology companies to modify their products to make them “exploitable” — that is, vulnerable to targeted attacks by the NSA.

11. The NSA uses tracking cookies to choose hacking targetsMost commercial websites have “tracking cookies,” small bits of data that are stored on a user’s computer to help with ad targeting. Documents released by Snowden showed that the NSA uses these cookies to identify users as hacking targets.

12. The NSA cracked a popular standard for encrypting cell phone communicationsMost cell phone communications are encrypted to protect the privacy of users. But in 2013 we learned that the NSA cracked one of the most popular encryption standards, called A5, allowing them to intercept the contents of cell phone communications.

13. An NSA program allowed the NSA to record every phone call in a certain, unspecified, country and store it for 30 daysIn 2014 the Washington Post has reported that an NSA program allows the agency to record every phone call in an unspecified country, and store them for 30 days for later analysis. The Post didn’t identify the country, but the Intercept has reported that the program is being used in the Bahamas. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange says that Afghanistan has also been targeted under the program.

12. The NSA cracked a popular standard for encrypting cell phone communications

Most cell phone communications are encrypted to protect the privacy of users. But in 2013 we learned that the NSA cracked one of the most popular encryption standards, called A5, allowing them to intercept the contents of cell phone communications.

13. An NSA program allowed the NSA to record every phone call in a certain, unspecified, country and store it for 30 days

In 2014 the Washington Post has reported that an NSA program allows the agency to record every phone call in an unspecified country, and store them for 30 days for later analysis. The Post didn’t identify the country, but the Intercept has reported that the program is being used in the Bahamas. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange says that Afghanistan has also been targeted under the program.

How Big Business Is Helping Expand NSA Surveillance, Snowden Be Damned

April 1, 2015

by Lee Fang

Intercept

Since November 11, 2011, with the introduction of the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, American spy agencies have been pushing laws to encourage corporations to share more customer information. They repeatedly failed, thanks in part to NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s revelations of mass government surveillance. Then came Republican victories in last year’s midterm Congressional elections and a major push by corporate interests in favor of the legislation.

Today, the bill is back, largely unchanged, and if congressional insiders and the bill’s sponsors are to believed, the legislation could end up on President Obama’s desk as soon as this month. In another boon to the legislation, Obama is expected to reverse his past opposition and sign it, albeit in an amended and renamed form (CISPA is now CISA, the “Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act”). The reversal comes in the wake of high-profile hacks on JPMorgan Chase and Sony Pictures Entertainment. The bill has also benefitted greatly from lobbying by big business, which sees it as a way to cut costs and to shift some anti-hacking defenses onto the government.

For all its appeal to corporations, CISA represents a major new privacy threat to individual citizens. It lays the groundwork for corporations to feed massive amounts of communications to private consortiums and the federal government, a scale of cooperation even greater than that revealed by Snowden. The law also breaks new ground in suppressing pushback against privacy invasions; in exchange for channeling data to the government, businesses are granted broad legal immunity from privacy lawsuits — potentially leaving consumers without protection if companies break privacy promises that would otherwise keep information out of the hands of authorities.

Ostensibly, CISA is supposed to help businesses guard against cyber attacks by sharing information on threats with one another and with the government. Attempts must be made to filter personal information out of the pool of data that is shared. But the legislation — at least as marked up by the Senate Intelligence Committee — provides an expansive definition of what can be construed as a cyber security threat, including any information for responding to or mitigating “an imminent threat of death, serious bodily harm, or serious economic harm,” or that is potentially related to threats relating to weapons of mass destruction, threats to minors, identity theft, espionage, protection of trade secrets, and other possible offenses. Asked at a hearing in February how quickly such information could be shared with the FBI, CIA, or NSA, Deputy Undersecretary for Cybersecurity Phyllis Schneck replied, “fractions of a second.”

Questions persist on how to more narrowly define a cyber security threat, what type of personal data is shared, and which government agencies would retain and store this data. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who cast the lone dissenting vote against CISA on the Senate Intelligence Committee, declared the legislation “a surveillance bill by another name.” Privacy advocates agree. “The lack of use limitations creates yet another loophole for law enforcement to conduct backdoor searches on Americans,” argues a letter sent by a coalition of privacy organizations, including Free Press Action Fund and New America’s Open Technology Institute. Critics also argue that CISA would not have prevented the recent spate of high-profile hacking incidents. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Mark Jaycox noted in a blog post, the JPMorgan hack occurred because of an “un-updated server” and prevailing evidence about the Sony breach is “increasingly pointing to an inside job.”

But the intelligence community and corporate America have this year unified behind the bill. For a look into the breadth of the corporate advocacy campaign to pass CISA, see this letter cosigned by many of the most powerful corporate interests in America and sent to legislators earlier this year. Or another letter, reported in the Wall Street Journal, signed by “general counsels of more than 30 different firms, including 3M and Lockheed Martin Corp.”

The partnership between leading corporate lobbyists and the intelligence community was on full display at a cyber security summit hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce a few days before the midterm election last year, in which NSA director Admiral Mike Rogers asked a room filled with business representatives for support in passing laws like CISA. At one point, Ann Beauchesne, the lead homeland security lobbyist with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, asked Rogers, “How can the chamber be helpful to you?” — even suggesting a viral marketing campaign akin to the “ALS ice bucket challenge” to build public support.

Since November 11, 2011, with the introduction of the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, American spy agencies have been pushing laws to encourage corporations to share more customer information. They repeatedly failed, thanks in part to NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s revelations of mass government surveillance. Then came Republican victories in last year’s midterm Congressional elections and a major push by corporate interests in favor of the legislation.

Today, the bill is back, largely unchanged, and if congressional insiders and the bill’s sponsors are to believed, the legislation could end up on President Obama’s desk as soon as this month. In another boon to the legislation, Obama is expected to reverse his past opposition and sign it, albeit in an amended and renamed form (CISPA is now CISA, the “Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act”). The reversal comes in the wake of high-profile hacks on JPMorgan Chase and Sony Pictures Entertainment. The bill has also benefitted greatly from lobbying by big business, which sees it as a way to cut costs and to shift some anti-hacking defenses onto the government.

For all its appeal to corporations, CISA represents a major new privacy threat to individual citizens. It lays the groundwork for corporations to feed massive amounts of communications to private consortiums and the federal government, a scale of cooperation even greater than that revealed by Snowden. The law also breaks new ground in suppressing pushback against privacy invasions; in exchange for channeling data to the government, businesses are granted broad legal immunity from privacy lawsuits — potentially leaving consumers without protection if companies break privacy promises that would otherwise keep information out of the hands of authorities.

Ostensibly, CISA is supposed to help businesses guard against cyber attacks by sharing information on threats with one another and with the government. Attempts must be made to filter personal information out of the pool of data that is shared. But the legislation — at least as marked up by the Senate Intelligence Committee — provides an expansive definition of what can be construed as a cyber security threat, including any information for responding to or mitigating “an imminent threat of death, serious bodily harm, or serious economic harm,” or that is potentially related to threats relating to weapons of mass destruction, threats to minors, identity theft, espionage, protection of trade secrets, and other possible offenses. Asked at a hearing in February how quickly such information could be shared with the FBI, CIA, or NSA, Deputy Undersecretary for Cybersecurity Phyllis Schneck replied, “fractions of a second.”

Questions persist on how to more narrowly define a cyber security threat, what type of personal data is shared, and which government agencies would retain and store this data. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who cast the lone dissenting vote against CISA on the Senate Intelligence Committee, declared the legislation “a surveillance bill by another name.” Privacy advocates agree. “The lack of use limitations creates yet another loophole for law enforcement to conduct backdoor searches on Americans,” argues a letter sent by a coalition of privacy organizations, including Free Press Action Fund and New America’s Open Technology Institute. Critics also argue that CISA would not have prevented the recent spate of high-profile hacking incidents. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Mark Jaycox noted in a blog post, the JPMorgan hack occurred because of an “un-updated server” and prevailing evidence about the Sony breach is “increasingly pointing to an inside job.”

But the intelligence community and corporate America have this year unified behind the bill. For a look into the breadth of the corporate advocacy campaign to pass CISA, see this letter cosigned by many of the most powerful corporate interests in America and sent to legislators earlier this year. Or another letter, reported in the Wall Street Journal, signed by “general counsels of more than 30 different firms, including 3M and Lockheed Martin Corp.”

The partnership between leading corporate lobbyists and the intelligence community was on full display at a cyber security summit hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce a few days before the midterm election last year, in which NSA director Admiral Mike Rogers asked a room filled with business representatives for support in passing laws like CISA. At one point, Ann Beauchesne, the lead homeland security lobbyist with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, asked Rogers, “How can the chamber be helpful to you?” — even suggesting a viral marketing campaign akin to the “ALS ice bucket challenge” to build public support. Watch the exchange below:

Rogers specifically mentioned during his speech before the Chamber how corporations who partner with agencies like the NSA can shift some of their information security work to the government — a major cost savings. “You have information that I need and I think I have information that can be of value to you,” Rogers said.

At the moment, there are multiple versions of CISA, including information sharing proposals from the House Homeland Security Committee and Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., but momentum has moved behind the Senate Intelligence Committee version, amended under Chairman Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., and Ranking Member Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-Calif. “The robust privacy requirements and liability protection make this a balanced bill, and I hope the Senate acts on it quickly,” said Feinstein as CISA passed 14-1 in a secret, closed session of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Reversing course over past opposition to the previous iteration of the bill, CISPA, the White House has demonstrated firm support for information sharing legislation this year. And more importantly, the Senate has drastically changed, helping to create a far more National Security Agency-friendly Congress. Sen. Mark Udall, D-Col., the chief opponent of CISA last session, was defeated in his reelection campaign last November, and the new Senate Majority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell has made CISA a “priority.”

California drought goes from bad to worse as state grapples with heat wave

Experts say fix requires global effort going into an era of climate change in which ‘the temperature is essentially always conducive to drought’

March 29, 2015

by Lauren Gambino in Los Angeles

The Guardian

Spring is starting to feel a lot like summer in California, as a record-setting heat wave punishes the parched state now in its fourth year of what is said to be the worst drought in a millennium.

Experts say the scorching spring days are part of a long-term warming pattern – driven largely by human activity – that is increasing the chances that future droughts will be as bad as this one. At fault is a warm and dry weather combination, which exacerbates the already dire drought conditions by drying soil, melting snow and driving up water usage.

“It’s like a one-two punch,” said Jeanine Jones, deputy drought manager for the state Department of Water Resources (DWR). “Not having enough water to fill our reservoirs and having the hot weather evaporate the little that we do have.”

According to the most recent US drought report, moderately below-average precipitation, coupled with extremely above-average temperatures, has maintained or worsened drought conditions in California. The consequences have been devastating, from shriveling reservoirs to vanishing groundwater, dying crops, thinning herds and raging wildfires.

California relies on a series of massive storms during the winter months to drop snow on the Cascades and Sierra Nevada mountain ranges. During the spring and summer months the snowpack, acting like a natural reservoir, melts as water demand rises.

But the recent extremely warm weather has caused precipitation to fall as rain rather than snow. The effect is dramatically less snowpack melt from the state’s mountain ranges, which can provide as much as a third of California’s water supply.

This year, the mountain runoff will likely be just a trickle. Snow on the mountains has fallen to 12% of average levels, from 28% last year. In March, data collected from parts of the Cascade and Sierra Nevada mountains indicated that some sites were for the first time snow-free by the first of the month. Jones said the 1 April snowpack measurements, which will be reported next week, are expected to be the lowest on record.

“That does not at all bode well for our depleted reservoirs,” Jones said.

Hotter temperatures are predicted to be the new norm in California, the result of rising temperatures under climate change. This month, for the first time since record keeping began in the late 1880s, the temperature in Los Angeles peaked in the 90s fahrenheit for six consecutive days, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Based on the current warming trajectory, the likelihood that low rain years will coincide with high heat years is almost a certainty.

“California is in a climate regime where are much more likely to get this kind of drought event again because of the role of temperature rise,” said Stanford University professor Noah Diffenbaugh, who led a study examining the role of warm temperatures in California’s droughts.

That study, published earlier this month in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that historically, California’s worst droughts occurred when conditions were both dry and warm, and that those conditions had occurred more frequently in the past two decades than in the last century.

Diffenbaugh said global warming was increasing the risk that dry and warm years would coincide to almost ensure a drought similar to the present one. The researchers also found that in the early and mid-20th century, the warm and dry conditions occurred more or less independently.

“We’re heading into a regime where the temperature is essentially always conducive to drought,” he said.

With no foreseeable end to the drought in sight, policy makers at every level are scrambling to conserve the little water the state does have and avert dire predictions that the state could run out of a water soon, possibly in one year.

“This is a struggle,” California governor Jerry Brown said at a press conference earlier this month. “Something we’re going to have to live with. For how long, we’re not sure.”

On Friday, Brown signed into law a more-than-$1bn plan to fast-track emergency relief to drought-stricken cities and communities, including food aid and drinking water. The proposal also includes hundreds of millions of dollars to fund long-term projects, involving water recycling, conservation awareness and flood control projects. At the signing, Brown said the plan was part of a wider effort to prepare California for an “uncertain future”.

The legislation followed action by the State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB) this month to pass what has been described as the most restrictive water conservation measures in state history. The plan limits the number of days residents can water their yards, and requires bars and restaurants to ask customers if they would like a glass of water before serving it.

“We are not seeing the level of stepping up and ringing the alarm bells that the situation warrants,” Felicia Marcus, the chairwoman of the SWRCB, said during the meeting this month. She said the measure was a first step, and that the board may consider even more stringent measures this spring.

Amir AghaKouchak, an assistant professor at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California, Irvine, said the $1bn water spending plan included “forward looking” measures that would help the state prepare for future dry spells. For example, the plan aims to improve infrastructure such as the state’s levees, which could help replenish underground aquifers, which have been drained by farmers drilling for groundwater to irrigate crops.

But he warned that there is still a lot scientists don’t know about droughts.

“We still don’t know a lot about how droughts develop, how they form, why they form,” AghaKouchak said. “If California wants to stay at the front of this, we have to consider science, and the best science. But it requires support.”

AghaKouchak said investing in “basic research” around water technology, water management and water harvesting could in the long-run improve strategies for responding to extreme weather. He also called for funding research to create better risk-assessment models to improve the predictability of droughts.

While there are conservation and planning policies that lawmakers can take now to conserve water and prepare the state for the next extreme weather event, California’s best hope lies ultimately in the willingness of the global community to confront climate change.

“This drought is not a local California issue,” AghaKouchak said. “This is a global issue. A single policymaker, or even all policymakers in California, alone cannot really do much about global temperature. This requires unprecedented international efforts and a truly global will to address these issues.”

Antarctica records unprecedented high temperatures in two new readings

The 20th anniversary of the discovery of the first “hole” in the ozone layer on Tuesday had many climate observers focused on the Arctic, where a study published last week found that polar bears were eating more birds’ eggs, perhaps due to lost hunting grounds with the disappearance of summer ice.

But equally significant climate news was playing out in Antarctica, where two climate stations registered ominous new potential measurements of accelerating climate change.

A weather station on the northern tip of the Antarctic peninsula recorded what may be the highest temperature ever on the continent, while a separate study published in the journal Science found that the losses of ice shelf volume in the western Antarctic had increased by 70% in the last decade.

Helen A Fricker of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, a co-author of the Science report, said that there was not necessarily a correlation between recent temperature fluctuations and disappearing ice.

“While it is fair to say that we’re seeing the ice shelves responding to climate change, we don’t believe there is enough evidence to directly relate recent ice shelf losses specifically to changes in global temperature,” Fricker said in an interview with Reuters.

What was incontestable were the unprecedentedly high temperature readings on the Antarctic ice mass.

The potential Antarctica record high of 63.5F (17.5C) was recorded on 24 March at the Esperanza Base, just south of the southern tip of Argentina. The reading, first noted on the Weather Underground blog, came one day after a nearby weather station, at Marambio Base, saw a record high of its own, at 63.3F (17.4C).

By any measure, the Esperanza reading this week was unusual. The previous record high at the base, of 62.7F (17.1C), was recorded in 1961.

But whether the recent readings represent records for Antarctica depends on the judgment of the World Meteorological Organization, the keeper of official global records for extreme temperatures, rainfall and hailstorms, dry spells and wind gusts. The WMO has recorded extreme temperatures in Antarctica but not settled the question of all-time records for the continent, according to Christopher Burt of Weather Underground.

One complicating factor is debate about what constitutes “Antarctica”. Both Esperanza and Marambio lie outside the Antarctic circle, though they are attached to the mainland by the frozen archipelago that is the Antarctic peninsula.

A conservative definition of what Antarctica is would seem to award the distinction of hottest-ever temperature to a 59F (15C) reading nearer the South Pole from 1974, according to Burt.

US-EU ‘Transatlantic Renaissance’ Plan Falling Apart At Seams

April 2.2015

Sputnik News

While the US President urges his Western allies to rally support for Washington’s stance on the most burning international issues, he should not be surprised that consensus is hard to come by, notes David J. Karl, pointing to the fact Barack Obama has repeatedly snubbed the continent’s leaders.

The “continuing ructions” in the US relations with its Western allies caused by Obama’s failure to develop strong ties with European leaders have ultimately overshadowed Washington’s plan of a “transatlantic renaissance,” David J. Karl, president of the Asia Strategy Initiative, an analysis and advisory firm, pointed out.

“[In 2008] speaking before a massive crowd assembled in Berlin’s “Tiergarten”, [President Obama] grandly vowed to “remake the world once again,” this time in a way that allies would “listen to each other, learn from each other and, most of all, trust each other.” That pledge is now so yesterday that Mrs. Merkel is reportedly longing for the days of George W. Bush,” the expert emphasized.

Instead of taking a chance to demonstrate to the world US-NATO solidarity, Barack Obama “in fact deliberately” missed an opportunity to meet with the new NATO Chief, Jens Stoltenberg, in Washington last week.

Stoltenberg requested a meeting with the US President “well in advance,” the expert underscored. Obama’s move could only be considered as an obvious slight to Jens Stoltenberg: the US President is one of a few Western leaders who have yet to with the NATO chief, who assumed the position almost six months ago.

However, Obama has demonstrated disinterest in the US’ European allies many times before. For instance, in November 2009, Barack Obama opted out of holding a meeting with European Union leaders at the White House sparking speculations that British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, one of the most pro-American French leaders, felt like they were being ignored.

Remarkably, a year later the American President once again missed a summit with the EU leaders.

In September 2009, during a so-called “reset” of relations with Moscow, Barack Obama changed his plans of deploying a missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic, but did not bother to inform his eastern European counterparts about his decision.

David J. Karl cited a top Polish security official who said that Warsaw heard Obama had shifted the plan though the media.

Curiously, the members of the Obama administration also demonstrated little if any respect to the US’ continental allies.

A senior German official close to Chancellor Angela Merkel remarked that Susan Rice, the US National Security Adviser, in 2013, pressed the German team to adopt the US approach to the Syrian crisis openly demonstrating that she was not interested in the EU view, David J. Karl noted.

The expert added that Rice even used the hardly diplomatic term “motherfucker,” causing outrage among German politicians.

The leaked phone conversation of Victoria Nuland, the Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, who graphically cursed the EU, once again demonstrated the Obama cabinet’s attitude towards its European allies.

While Obama is urging the EU to rally common Western positions on such issues as the Ukrainian conflict, Iran’s nuclear program and the rise of China, he should not be surprised that consensus is hard to come by, the expert underscored.

Instead of repairing ties with Europe, Barack Obama has evidently mismanaged relations with the continent, David J. Karl stated.

Plutocracy The First Time Around: Revisiting the Great Upheaval and the First Gilded Age

by Steve Fraser

TomGram

[The following passages are excerpted and slightly adapted from The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power (Little, Brown and Company).]

Part 1: The Great Upheaval

What came to be known as the Great Upheaval, the movement for the eight-hour day, elicited what one historian has called “a strange enthusiasm.” The normal trade union strike is a finite event joining two parties contesting over limited, if sometimes intractable, issues. The mass strike in 1886 or before that in 1877 — all the many localized mass strikes that erupted in towns and small industrial cities after the Civil War and into the new century — was open-ended and ecumenical in reach.

So, for example, in Baltimore when the skilled and better-paid railroad brakemen on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad first struck in 1877 so, too, did less well off “box-makers, sawyers, and can-makers, engaged in the shops and factories of that city, [who] abandoned their places and swarmed into the streets.” This in turn “stimulated the railroad men to commit bolder acts.” When the governor of West Virginia sent out the Berkeley Light Guard and Infantry to confront the strikers at Martinsburg at the request of the railroad’s vice president, the militia retreated and “the citizens of the town, the disbanded militia, and the rural population of the surrounding country fraternized,” encouraging the strikers.

The centrifugal dynamic of the mass strike was characteristic of this extraordinary phenomenon. By the third day in Martinsburg the strikers had been “reinforced during the night at all points by accessions of working men engaged in other avocations than railroading,” which, by the way, made it virtually impossible for federal troops by then on the scene to recruit scabs to run the trains.

By the fourth day, “mechanics, artisans, and laborers in every department of human industry began to show symptoms of restlessness and discontent.” Seeping deeper and deeper into the subsoil of proletarian life, down below the “respectable” working class of miners and mechanics and canal boat-men, frightened observers reported a “mighty current of passion and hate” sweeping up a “vast swarm of vicious idlers, vagrants, and tramps.” And so it went.

Smaller cities and towns like Martinsburg were often more likely than the biggest urban centers to experience this sweeping sense of social solidarity. (What today we might call a massing of the 99%.) During the 1877 Great Uprising, the social transmission of the mass strike moved first along the great trunk lines of the struck railroads, but quickly flowed into the small villages and towns along dozens of tributary lines and into local factories, workshops, and coal mines as squads of strikers moved from settlement to settlement mobilizing the populace.

In these locales, face-to-face relations still prevailed. It was by no means taken for granted that antagonism between labor and capital was fated to be the way of the world. Aversion to the new industrial order and a “democratic feeling” brought workers, storekeepers, lawyers, and businessmen of all sorts together, appalled by the behavior of large industrialists who often enough didn’t live in those communities and so were the more easily seen as alien beings.

It was not uncommon for local officials, like the mayor of Cumberland, Maryland, to take the side of the mass strikers. The federal postmaster in Indianapolis wired Washington, “Our mayor is too weak, and our Governor will do nothing. He is believed to sympathize with the strikers.” In Fort Wayne, like many other towns its size, the police and militia simply could not be counted on to put down the insurrectionists. In this world, corporate property was not accorded the same sanctified status still deferred to when it came to personal property. Sometimes company assets were burned to the ground or disabled; at other times they were seized, but not damaged.

Metropolises also witnessed their own less frequent social earthquakes. Anonymous relations were more common there, the gulf separating social classes was much wider, and the largest employers could count on the new managerial and professional middle classes for support and a political establishment they could more often rely on.

Still, the big city hardly constituted a DMZ. During the mass strike of 1877 in Pittsburgh, when 16 citizens were killed, the city erupted and “the whole population seemed to have joined the rioters.”

“Strange to say,” noted one journalist, elements of the population who had a “reputation for being respectable people — tradesmen,â€‹ householders, well-to-do mechanics and such — openly mingled with the [turbulent mob] and encouraged them to commit further deeds of violence.” Here, too, as in smaller locales, enraged as they clearly were, mass strikers still drew a distinction between railroad property and the private property of individuals, which they scrupulously avoided attacking. Often enough the momentum of the mass strike was enough to win concessions on wages, hours, or on other conditions of work — although they might be provisional, not inscribed in contracts, and subject to being violated or ignored when law and order was restored.

“Eight Hours for What We Will”

Brickyard and packinghouse workers, dry goods clerks, and iron molders, unskilled Jewish female shoe sewers and skilled telegraphers, German craftsmen from the bookbinding trade and unlettered Bohemian freight handlers, all assembled together under the banner of the Knights of Labor or less formal, impromptu assemblies. The full name of the Knights was actually the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor, a peculiar name that like so much of the electric language of the long nineteenth century sounds so dissonant and oddly exotic to modern ears. With one foot in the handicraft past and the other trying to step beyond the proletarian servitude waiting ominously off in the future, the Knights was itself the main organizational expression of the mass strike. It was part trade union, part guild, part political protest, part an aspiring alternate cooperative economy.

At all times and especially in smaller industrial towns, the Knights relied on ties to the larger community — kin, neighbors, local tradespeople — not merely the fellowship of the workplace. Like the Populist movement, it practically constituted an alternative social universe of reading rooms, newspapers, lecture societies, libraries, clubs, and producer cooperatives. Infused with a sense of the heroic and the “secular sacred,” the Knights envisioned themselves as if on a mission, appealing to the broad middling ranks of local communities to rescue the nation and preserve its heritage of republicanism and the dignity of productive labor.

This “Holy Order,” ambiguous and ambivalent in ultimate purpose, nevertheless mustered a profound resistance to the whole way of life represented by industrial capitalism even while wrestling with ways of surviving within it. So it offered everyday remedies — abolishing child and convict labor, establishing an income tax and public ownership of land for settlement not speculation, among others. Above all, however, it conveyed a yearning for an alternative, a “cooperative commonwealth” in place of the Hobbesian nightmare that Progress had become.

Transgressive by its nature, this “strange enthusiasm” shattered and then recombined dozens of more parochial attachments. The intense heat of the mass strike fused these shards into something more daring and generous-minded. Everything about it was unscripted. The mass strike had a rhythm all its own, syncopated and unpredictable as it spread like an epidemic from worksite to marketplace to slum. It had no command central, unlike a conventional strike, but neither was it some mysterious instance of spontaneous combustion. Rather, it had dozens of choreographers who directed local uprisings that nevertheless remained elastic enough to cohere with one another while remaining distinct. Its program defied easy codification. At one moment and place it was about free speech, at another about a foreman’s chronic abuse, here about the presence of scabs and armed thugs, there about a wage cut.

It ranged effortlessly from something as prosaic as a change in the piece rate to something as portentous as the nationalization of the country’s transportation and communication infrastructure, but at its core stood the demand for the eight-hour day. Blunt yet profound, it defined for that historical moment both the irreducible minimum of a just and humane civilization and what the prevailing order of things seemingly could not, or would not, grant. The “Eight Hour Day Song,” which became the movement’s anthem, captured that intermixing of the quotidian and the transcendent:

“We want to feel the sunshine

We want to smell the flowers;

We’re sure God has willed it.

And we mean to have eight hours.

We’re summoning our forces from

shipyard, shop, and mill;

Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest

Eight hours for what we will.”

When half a million workers struck on May 1, 1886 — the original “May Day,” still celebrated most places in the world except in the United States where it began — the strikers called it Emancipation Day. How archaic that sounds. Such hortatory rhetoric has gone out of fashion. The eight-hour-day movement of 1886 and the mass strikes that preceded, accompanied, and followed it were a freedom movement in the land of the free directed against a form of slavery no one would recognize or credit today.

Part 2: A Potemkin Village of the Nouveau Riche

Feudalism of a distinctly theatrical kind was the utopian refuge of the upper classes. Mostly that consisted of a retreat from an active engagement with the tumult around them. Some plutocrats, like George Pullman or J.P. Morgan, were, on the contrary, deeply implicated in running things. Morgan functioned as the nation’s unofficial central banker, but from a distinctly feudal point of view, famously declaring, “I owe the public nothing.”

Other corporate chieftains, like Mark Hanna, a kingmaker within the Republican Party, or August Belmont, who performed a similar role for the Democrats, became increasingly involved in political affairs. (Hanna once mordantly remarked, “There are only two things that are important in politics. The first is money and I can’t remember what the second one is.”) The two party machines had exercised some independence immediately after the Civil War, demanding tribute from the business classes. As the century ran down, however, they were domesticated, becoming water carriers for those they had once tithed. Legislative bodies during this era, including the Senate, otherwise known as “the Millionaires Club,” filled up with the factotums of corporate America.

Far larger numbers of the nouveau riche, a rentier class of landlords and coupon clippers, however, were gun-shy about embroiling themselves. Instead, they confected a hermetically sealed-off Potemkin village in which they pretended they were aristocrats with all the entitlements and deference and legitimacy that comes with that station.

Looking back a century and more, all that dressing­ up — the masquerade balls where the Social Register elite (the “Patriarchs” of the 1870s, the “400” by the 1890s) paraded about as Henry VIII and Marie Antoinette, the liveried servants, the castles disassembled in France or Italy or England and shipped stone by stone to be reassembled on Fifth Avenue, the fake genealogies and coats of arms, hunting to hounds and polo playing, raising pedigreed livestock for decorative purposes, the helter-skelter piling up of heirloom jewelry, Old Masters, and oriental rugs, the marrying off of American “dollar princesses” to the hard-up offspring of Europe’s decaying nobility, the exclusive watering holes in Newport and Bar Harbor, the prep schools, and gentlemen’s clubs fencing them off from hoi polloi, the preoccupation with social preferment that turned prized parterre boxes at opera houses and concert halls into deadly serious tournament jousts — seems silly. Or more to the point, it all appears as incongruously weird behavior in the homeland of the democratic revolution. And in some sense it was.

Yet this spectacle had a purpose, or multiple purposes. First of all, it was a time-tested way of displaying power for all to see. More than that was going on, however. It constituted the infrastructure of a utopian cultural fantasy by a risen class so raw and unsure of its place and mission in the world that it needed all these borrowed credentials as protective coloring. An elaborate camouflage, it might serve to legitimate them both in the eyes of those over whom they were suddenly exercising or seeking to exercise enormous power, and in their own eyes as well.

After all, many of these first- and second-generation bourgeois potentates had just sprung from social obscurity and the homeliest economic pursuits. Their native crudity was in plain sight, mocked by many. Herman Melville remarked, “The class of wealthy people are, in aggregate, such a mob of gilded dunces, that not to be wealthy carries with it a certain distinction and nobility.” As their social prominence and economic throw weight increased at an extraordinary rate — and, along with it, the most furious challenges to their sudden preeminence — so too did the need to fabricate delusions of stability and tradition, to feel rooted even in the shallowest of soils, to thicken the borders of their social insulation.

Caroline Astor, better known as “Mrs. Astor,” the doyenne of this world, whose grandfather-in-law had started out as a butcher, wrestled to express how such tensions might be resolved. Her family’s life was described by one observer this way: “The livery of their footmen was a close copy of that familiar at Windsor Castle and their linen was marked with emblems of royalty. At the opera they wore tiaras, and when they dined the plates were in keeping with imperial pretensions.”

Similar portraits were painted of many of the great dynastic families and their offspring; the Goulds, Harry Payne Whitney, the Vanderbilts, and others were depicted in ways that made them highly improbable candidates to form a socially conscious aristocracy. Mrs. Astor herself was once described as a “walking chandelier” because so many diamonds and pearls were pinned to every available empty space on her body.

Her relative John Jacob Astor IV, a notorious playboy, was chastised, along with his peers, by an Episcopal minister: “Mr. Astor and his crowd of New York and Newport associates have for years not paid the slightest attention to the laws of the church and state which have seemed to contravene their personal pleasures or sensual delights. But you can’t defy God all the time. The day of reckoning comes and comes not in our own way.” Some years later Astor went down with the Titanic. Another member of the clan declined an invitation by President Hayes to serve as ambassador to England on the grounds that it violated the family credo: “Work hard, but never work after dinner.”

Ward McAllister, the major-domo of the Social Register’s “400,” took a stab at coherence from another angle. “Now, with the rapid growth of riches, millionaires are too common to receive much deference; a fortune of a million is only respectable poverty,” McAllister said. “So we have to draw social boundaries on another basis: old connections, gentle breeding, perfection in all the requisite accomplishments of a gentleman, elegant leisure and an unstained private reputation count for more than newly gotten riches.”

But the “old connections” were as new and ephemeral as yesterday’s business negotiation, and “gentle breeding” for some didn’t even include full literacy or numeracy but did include copious spitting; the “accomplishments of a gentleman” would have to embrace every kind of shrewd dealing in the marketplace, or else the pickings would be scarce. And the tides of America’s volatile economy meant that no matter how high the sand dunes were built around the redoubts of “old money,” they could never resist for long the onrush of new money.

“Awful Democracy”

It was all, as one historian noted, a “pageant and fairy tale,” a peculiar arcadia of castles and servants, an homage to the “beau ideal” by a newly hatched social universe trying but failing to “live down its mercantile origins.” But this dream life was ill-suited to the arts and crafts of ruling over a society that at best was apt to find this charade amusing, at worst an insult. What was missing was an actual aristocracy.

Wall Street Brahmin Henry Lee Higginson, fearing “Awful Democracy” — thatâ€‹ whole menagerie of radicalisms — urgently appealed to his fellows to take up the task of mastery, “more wisely and more humanely than the kings and nobles have done. Our chance is now — before the country is full and the struggle for bread becomes intense. I would have the gentlemen of the country lead the new men who are trying to become gentlemen.”

The appeal fell mainly on deaf ears. Many in this set were sea-dog capitalists, dynasty builders, for whom accumulation was a singular, all-consuming obsession.

They reckoned with outside authority if they had to, manipulated it if they could, but just as often went about their business as if it didn’t exist. Bred to hold politics in contempt, one Social Register memoirist recalled growing up during the “great barbeque.” He was taught to think of politics as something “remote, disreputable, and infamous, like slave-trading or brothel-keeping.”

Together they concocted a world set apart from the commercial, political, sexual, ethnic, and religious chaos threatening to envelop them. An upper-class “white city” of chivalry, honor codes, and fraternal loyalties, mannered, carefree, and self-regarding, it was a laboratory of narcissistic self-indulgence, an ostensible repudiation of those distinctly bourgeois character traits of prudence, thrift, and money-grubbing.

Born into an age defined by steam, steel, and electricity, they attempted to wall themselves off from modernity in an alternate universe, part medieval, part Renaissance Europe, part ancient Greece and Rome, a pastiche of golden ages. The long nineteenth century had given birth to a plutocracy unschooled and indisposed to win the trust and preside over a society it feared. Instead, the plutocracy preferred playacting at aristocracy, simultaneously confirming all the popular suspicions about its real intentions and forming a society that had forsaken society.

Brute Force

The self-imposed aloofness and feudal pretentiousness of the upper classes left the institutions and cultural wherewithal of the commonwealth thin on the ground. An indigenous suspicion of overbearing government born out of the nation’s founding left the apparatus of the state strikingly weak and underdeveloped well past the turn of the twentieth century. All of its resources, that is, except one: force, rule by blunt instrument. The frequent resort to violence that so marked the period was thus the default position of a ruling elite not really prepared to rule. And of course it only aggravated the dilemma of consent. Those suffering from the callousness of the dominant classes were only too ready to treat them as they depicted themselves — that is, as aristocrats but usurping ones lacking even a scintilla of legitimate authority.

The American upper classes did not constitute a seasoned aristocracy, but could only mimic one. They lacked the former’s sense of social obligation, of noblesse oblige, of what in the Old World emerged as a politically coherent “Tory socialism” that worked to quiet class antagonisms. But neither did they absorb the democratic ethos that today allows the country’s gilded elite to act as if they were just plain folks: a credible enough charade of plutocratic populism. Instead, faced with mass social disaffection, they turned to the “tramp terror” and other innovations in machine-gun technology, to private corporate armies and government militias, to suffrage restrictions, judicial injunctions, and lynchings. Why behave otherwise in dealing with working-class “scum” a community of “mongrel firebugs”?

One historian has described what went on during the Great Uprising as an “interlocking directorate of railroad executives, military officers, and political officials which constituted the apex of the country’s new power elite.” After Haymarket, the haute bourgeoisie went into the fort­ building business; Fort Sheridan in Chicago, for example, was erected to defend against “internal insurrection.” New York City’s armories, which have long since been turned into sites for indoor tennis, concerts, and theatergoing, were originally erected after the 1877 insurrection to deal with the working-class canaille.

During the anthracite coal strike of 1902, George Baer, president of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad and leader of the mine owners, sent a letter to the press: “The rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for… not by the labor agitators, but by the Christian men of property to whom God has given control of the property rights of the country.” To the Anthracite Coal Commission investigating the uproar, Baer proclaimed, “These men don’t suffer. Why hell, half of them don’t even speak English.”

Ironically, it was thanks in part to its immersion in bloodshed that the first rudimentary forms of a more sophisticated class consciousness began to appear among this new elite. These would range from Pullman-like Potemkin villages to more practical-minded attempts to reach a modus vivendi with elements of the trade union movement readier to accept the wages system.

Yet the political arena, however much its main institutions bent to the will of the rich and mighty, remained ostensibly contested terrain. On the one hand, powerful interests relied on state institutions both to keep the “dangerous classes” in line and to facilitate the process of primitive accumulation. But an opposed instinct, native to capitalism in its purest form, wanted the state kept weak and poor so as not to intrude where it wasn’t wanted. Due to this ambivalence, the American state was notoriously undernourished, its bureaucracy kept skimpy, amateurish, and machine-controlled, its executive and administrative reach stunted.

No society can live indefinitely on such shifting terrain, leaving the most vital matters unresolved. Even before the grand denouement of the Great Depression and New Deal arrived, an answer to the labor question was surfacing, one that would put an end to the long era of anti-capitalism. It would become the antechamber to the Age of Acquiescence.

Steve Fraser is an historian, editor, writer, and TomDispatch regular. His newest book is The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power, excerpted above. His previous books include Every Man a Speculator: A History of Wall Street in American Life and Wall Street: America’s Dream Palace. He is the co-founder of the American Empire Project.

Excerpted from the book The Age of Acquiescence by Steve Fraser

]]>0adminhttp://www.tbrnews.org/?p=9802015-03-23T01:00:19Z2015-03-23T01:00:19ZThe Voice of the White House

Washington D.C. March 22. 2015: “Certainty is illusion and the illusion here is the often-stated belief that Israel is “Americas’s very best friend.” This obviously is not true and put about to reassure Jewish voters. The truth is that Israel is the Spanish Fly in the Middle East political ointment and has been stirring up serious problems for everyone ever since 1948. Their prime mininster, Bibi the Fat, has a serious mouth and attitude problems as witness his bellowings of late concerning the fact that the United States is trying to establish sensible relations with Iran. Bibi wants this country to bomb all their enemies flat and when we refuse, roars with rage under the mistaken belief that he and his country are important. If it weren’t for American support, Israel would be of less importance, and trouble, than the Spratley Islands. Bibi got reelected so he can continue slaughtering women and children in Gaza and, in private, call Obama a “Goddam nigger” (as he did recently to their ambassador in Washington.)”

One Year After Russia Annexed Crimea, Locals Prefer Moscow To Kiev

March 20, 2015

by Kenneth Rapoza

Forbes

The U.S and European Union may want to save Crimeans from themselves. But the Crimeans are happy right where they are.

One year after the annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula in the Black Sea, poll after poll shows that the locals there — be they Ukrainians, ethnic Russians or Tartars are all in agreement: life with Russia is better than life with Ukraine.

Little has changed over the last 12 months.Despite huge efforts on the part of Kiev, Brussels, Washington and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the bulk of humanity living on the Black Sea peninsula believe the referendum to secede from Ukraine was legit. At some point, the West will have to recognize Crimea’s right to self rule. Unless we are all to believe that the locals polled by Gallup and GfK were done so with FSB bogey men standing by with guns in their hands.

In June 2014, a Gallup poll with the Broadcasting Board of Governors asked Crimeans if the results in the March 16, 2014 referendum to secede reflected the views of the people. A total of 82.8% of Crimeans said yes. When broken down by ethnicity, 93.6% of ethnic Russians said they believed the vote to secede was legitimate, while 68.4% of Ukrainians felt so. Moreover, when asked if joining Russia will ultimately make life better for them and their family, 73.9% said yes while 5.5% said no.

In February 2015, a poll by German polling firm GfK revealed that attitudes have not changed. When asked “Do you endorse Russia’s annexation of Crimea?”, a total of 82% of the respondents answered “yes, definitely,” and another 11% answered “yes, for the most part.” Only 2% said they didn’t know, and another 2% said no. Three percent did not specify their position.

With two studies out of the way, both Western-based, it seems without question that the vast majority of Crimeans do not feel they were duped into voting for annexation, and that life with Russia will be better for them and their families than life with Ukraine. A year ago this week, 83% of Crimeans went to the polling stations and almost 97% expressed support for reunification with their former Soviet parent. The majority of people living on the peninsula are ethnic Russians.

The U.S. made a big deal about ethnic minorities there known as the Tartars, which account for around 10% of the population. Of the 4% total that said they did not endorse Russia’s annexation, the vast majority — 55% — said that they feel that way because they believe it should have been allowed by Kiev in accordance with international law. Another 24% said the referendum vote was “held under pressure”, which likely means political or military threats to vote and vote in favor.

The GfK survey also asked if the Ukrainian media have given Crimea a fair assessment. Only 1% said that the Ukrainian media “provides entirely truthful information” and only 4% said it was “more often truthful than deceitful.”

For now, the Gallup and GfK polls show a deeply divided Ukraine. The division of political allegiances ultimately threatens Ukraine’s territorial integrity. Only 19% in the east and 26.8% in the southeast think Ukraine should join the European Union, while 84.2% in the west believe Ukraine is a natural fit with the E.U..Nearly 60% in the north agree that E.U. is the place to be, and just under half in the center part of the country want E.U. integration.

NATO integration is even less supported in the southeast and east, and a little over a third in the center and north agreeing that Ukraine should join the Western military powers. In the west, that number rises to 53%.

Those numbers also coincide with Ukraine’s trust or distrust with Washington. The pro-integration west, north and center portions of Ukraine all view the U.S. role in the crisis as mostly positive. Well under a third say so in the east and southeast, and almost no one, including the Tartars, believe so in Crimea.

Interestingly enough, despite Russia’s perceived involvement in the separatist movement in eastern Ukraine, only 35.7% of people polled there said they viewed Russia’s involvement as mostly positive while 71.3% of Crimeans were more in line with Russia’s world view, according to the year old poll from Gallup.

This week, the State Department’s press secretary Jen Psaki said sanctions on Russia will continue until Crimea is returned to Ukraine.Both the State Department and Treasury Department did not clarify whether that was an actual policy statement, nor whether that included the sectoral sanctions which were applied in a third round of sanctions last July following the downing of Malaysian flight MH17 over east Ukraine.

South Stream: Life After Death? Russia begins construction on a trans-Macedonian pipeline that could resurrect the South Stream project.

March 20,.2015

by Sergey Strokan, Andrew Korybko

Sputnik

The pipeline’s projected capacity currently isn’t large enough to substitute for South Stream, but its construction could lay the foundation for its successor. This is because Russia earlier announced that it will be phasing out all gas transit through Ukraine when Turkish Stream goes online in a few years, and urged the Balkan states to quickly agree to an alternative way to receive Russian gas, on which they all depend.

The Hungarian President discussed possible financing for an alternative Balkan pipeline with Erdogan during a four-day visit to Turkey, and the Macedonian Foreign Minister was also in Ankara on a visit as well. The latest reports are that Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras pushed his planned visit to Moscow ahead by a full month, and it remains possible that the Balkan pipeline could be on the itinerary of discussion for when he arrives in Russian on 8 April.

With Bulgaria out of the picture, it appears ever more likely that a new South Stream project could be resurrected through Greece and Macedonia, with latest announcement forming the geographic basis of the new pipeline.

Netanyahu, the George Wallace of the Middle East

Say bye-bye to the “special relationship”

March 20, 2015

by Justin Raimondo,

Antiwar

Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress provoked a storm of controversy that has only increased since his victory in the Israeli elections. It was a blatant attempt to split the US polity and claim the Republican-controlled Congress as what Patrick J. Buchanan once described as “Israeli-occupied territory.” Yet that long occupation may be ending sooner rather than later as the tectonic plates of America’s political landscape – and the globe – shake and shift.

The reasons for this seismic movement are rooted in objective factors that none of the actors in this drama can control, and these are underscored in the radical change, both in content and tone, of Netanyahu’s rhetoric compared to his 2011 peroration before Congress.

Back then, you’ll recall, when the Israeli Prime Minister appeared on Capitol Hill and spoke before our cheering solons, he spoke these words:

“Two years ago, I publicly committed to a solution of two states for two peoples – a Palestinian state alongside a Jewish state.”

(Applause.)

“I’m willing to make painful compromises to achieve this historic peace. As the leader of Israel, it’s my responsibility to lead my people to peace.”

(Applause.)

“Now, this is not easy for me. It’s not easy, because I recognize that in a genuine peace, we’ll be required to give up parts of the ancestral Jewish homeland.”

This is the face of Bibi the Benevolent, stern but basically a friend of America and an advocate of Western values. But there is another face, which he waited a few years before unveiling, and it isn’t pretty. Speaking in Israel during the recent election campaign, he declared:

“I think that anyone who moves to establish a Palestinian state and evacuate territory gives territory away to radical Islamist attacks against Israel. The left has buried its head in the sand time and after time and ignores this, but we are realistic and understand.”

If Tzipi Livni and Isaac Herzog are elected, he told a group of “settlers,” “Hamastan B will be established here.” Pledging to continue building “settlements” with money dispensed by gullible Uncle Sam, he hurled his defiance at the Americans, who he claimed were trying – along with the Europeans – to unseat him. The contempt for the West and its values that his words conveyed was underscored by his appeal to right-wing nationalist voters to turn out and vote Likud in order to deflect the efforts of Israeli Palestinians who, he said, were intent on turning out “in droves” on election day in order to defeat him.

Every American President since Jimmy Carter has put the two-state solution at the top of their Middle East agenda, and the hope embodied in the peace process has anchored our “special relationship” with the Jewish state in the rough seas that beset the region. As long as the Israelis remained committed to this principle, they could get away with pretending to be “the only democracy” in their neighborhood, and not the ruthless occupiers of a conquered people. And the Americans went along with this delusion – or, rather, self-delusion – at the behest of the powerful pro-Israel lobby, which was, after all, filled with liberals as well as pro-Likud conservatives, who regularly voted Democratic and played an important role in getting the civil rights movement in this country off the ground.

That is all changed, now, especially with Bibi’s panicked remarks about “droves” of Arabs – Israeli citizens – being “bused in” to vote. Instead of the Churchillian figure adored by the neoconservative right, the Israeli Prime Minister looks more like George Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door. An alliance that was supposedly built on mutually shared “values” is falling apart at the seams.

The growing discord between Washington and Tel Aviv isn’t about the personal antipathy between Bibi and Obama. It’s about the antipathy between the American values of liberal democracy and equality before the law and the religious obscurantism and ruthless militarism of the new Israel – a nation that stands revealed as a modern Sparta, not the Athens we all thought it to be.

In his 2011 address to Congress, Netanyahu averred “We’re not the British in India, we’re not the Belgians in the Congo,” and went on to tout the historic “bond between the Jewish people and the Jewish land.” “But there is another truth,” he continued:

“The Palestinians share this small land with us. We seek a peace in which they’ll be neither Israel’s subjects nor its citizens. They should enjoy a national life of dignity as a free, viable and independent people living in their own state.”

Now that this goal has been repudiated, what Netanyahu can no longer evade is the fact that he and his countrymen are the British in India, and the Belgians in the Congo. And as the great Israeli classical liberal Yeshayahu Leibowitz argued, this has been true since the end of the Six Day War, when the Israelis refused to give up the conquered territories and instead occupied them, setting up a giant prison in which the Palestinians were forced to live – and which also imprisoned the occupiers inside an ideological penitentiary from which, at this point, there is no escape.

The walls surrounding that prison have grown higher – and, indeed, have materialized in the physical world in the form of the Wall that separates Israel proper from the land of its Palestinian helots. This same malevolence has taken human form in the rise of Israeli politicians like Avigdor Lieberman, whose far-right party advocates a Greater Israel encompassing not only “Judea” and “Samaria” but also a large chunk of Jordan. The same spirit animates Naftali Bennett, the American-born ultra-nationalist whose Jewish Homeland party opposes Palestinian self-determination, supports the “settler” movement, and has successfully competed with Likud for the loyalty of Israeli voters. In order to pull off his electoral coup, Netanyahu had to woo them back with the Wallaceite rhetoric he employed in the final days before the election. Yet both Lieberman and Bennett will no doubt play a major role in the new government – the most right-wing government in Israel’s history.

The Israelis have been moving in this direction for a long time, and, although their very effective propaganda operation in this country has done a good job of prettifying it, the ugly reality has now become so apparent that their political leaders no longer bother concealing it. Indeed, they flaunt their bigotry, their hatred, and the power of their American lobby to give Israel a free hand in spite of President Obama’s growing opposition to their goals.

Yet, like Israel itself, the Israel lobby – and by this I mean the Republican party and its shrinking periphery – has locked itself into an ideological box, with little room to maneuver. Unable to defend the indefensible, they find themselves in the same position as the segregationists who tried in vain to hold back the civil rights revolution in the South – i.e. in full retreat. Yes, George Wallace stood at the head of a political movement that seemed impressive at the time, and ran as a third party presidential candidate, but that movement soon collapsed and did not survive Wallace’s death except in various isolated pockets of extremism. It’s no accident that, today, National Review, whose founder and editor William F. Buckley, Jr., wrote editorials arguing against the right of “Negroes” to vote, is today among Israel’s chief cheerleaders, holding up Netanyahu as the ideal political leader they only wish America had.

The ideological and geopolitical tides of change have finally caught up with Israel, even before the demographic wave of Arab births succeeded in overwhelming it. For the simple fact of the matter is that, barring Mike Huckabee‘s ascension to the White House, whoever occupies the Oval Office come 2017 will have to deal with the objective factors that are dissolving the “special relationship.” Israel has chosen to isolate itself from the international community, and unless we want to share that prison cell with Bibi and his successors, the American political class will have to begin distancing itself from a country fast becoming a pariah among nations.

This has already begun to happen, with US officials strongly hinting that Netanyahu’s repudiation of the two-state solution means we’ll have to reconsider our role as Israel’s “shield” in the UN Security Council. And worse – from the Israeli perspective – is soon to come.

The Zionist movement was originally devoted to the principle of “national liberation,” and the principle of self-determination for all peoples, but the internal logic of their program eventually undermined this ideological window-dressing. The Labor wing, devoted to an egalitarian vision of socialism and cooperation between Jewish émigrés and indigenous Arabs, had to give way to a more realistic “revisionist” vision of a Greater Israel that would rise at the Arabs’ expense.

Now the masks have been dropped, and Israel’s true face is there for all to see. Some will look upon it and continue to proclaim its great beauty, or will go to great lengths to explain away and even prettify its flaws – but it’s only a matter of time now before the world turns away in disgust.

Between 1956 and 1958, and again from 1963 to 1967, his family lived in the United States in Cheltenham Township, Pennsylvania,* a suburb of Philadelphia, where he attended and graduated from Cheltenham High School and was active in a debate club.

Bibi, then a cross-dresser, worked for a time for the Bonwit-Teller department store in Philadelphjia. The Bonwit-Teller store has been located at 17th and Chestnut streets in Philadephia. Bibi, using the name Esther Nitai, modeled women’s undergarments for this firm in 1965.

He speaks fluent English, with a noticeable Philadelphia accent.

Netanyahu returned to the United States in late 1972 to study architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology eventually completed an S.B. degree in architecture

At MIT, Netanyahu graduated near the top of his class, and was recruited as a management consultant for the Boston Consulting Group in Boston, Massachusetts, working at the company between 1976 and 1978.

In 1975 he earned an S.M.degree from the MIT Sloan School of Management in 1977. Concurrently, he studied political science at Harvard University.

At that time he officially changed his name to Benjamin Ben Nitai (Nitai, a reference to both Mount Nitai and to the eponymous Jewish sage Nittai of Arbela, was a pen name often used by his father for articles.)

Spouse(s)

Miriam Weizmann (1972–1978)

Fleur Cates (1981–1984)

Sara Ben-Artzi (1991–present)

*Cheltenham Township is a home rule municipality bordering North Philadelphia in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, United States.

A. Well, things are going as well as expected, better perhaps than expected. There is military progress there (Lebanon) and we have wonderful cooperation here.

B. For sure, but don’t forget the dangers in having too much cooperation. All right for this moment but in the long run, this can certainly backfire on us. You know, we are seen as being too much influential with the Bush people.

A. I wouldn’t worry too much about that. The media is certainly not to worry about and most Americans really do not care about things there (Lebanon) The main point is that by the time the U.S. makes itself felt at the UN, we will have accomplished our goals and established the buffer we need.

B. Absolutely but…there is still the future to think about.

A. Who cares? Once we establish the buffer, the rest is just shit. It will all be hidden soon in the coming press reports of Arab ‘attacks’ on the U.S. This is for the voting in November. You know, ‘many Arab groups will for sure attack American targets.’ They (the U.S. Government) will choose so-called target areas where they need the most support. We don’t need to worry about Miami, Skokie or Beverly Hills after all. (Laughter) and this is a little crude but the public here is terribly stupid and the warning color days worked before, didn’t they?

B. Yes, but there are second thoughts on all of that. If you go to the well too often, there are problems. People lose interest.

A. The British are being such swine about this, aren’t they? They are causing trouble about the bombs these days.

B. Just a few troublemakers. The press here does not cover that and who reads the foreign media? Most Americans can’t read anyway. But there is danger that the U.N. might be motivated to move a peace keeping force into Lebanon and this might negate our purposes. Hesbollah must be utterly wiped out and Syria must be made to realize…with force if necessary…that it cannot supply the terrorists with more Iranian rockets. Maybe an accidental airstrike on Syrian military units could say to them to mind their own business. We have done this before.

A. It is too bad that we cannot teach Tehran a lesson. The ultimate goal would be to have America attack Iran but I am afraid the American military is dead set against this…

B. They are all Jew-haters up there.

A. For sure but we know that Americans can bomb the shit out of Tehran and hopefully kill off a number of the militants, probably disrupt their atomic program and teach all of the area that the U.S. means business. We support them, they support us. But they cannot send in ground troops and if we did that, our losses would not be borne at home. As it is, there are the usual malcontents bleating about the Lebanon business.

B. They are just afraid they will get a rocket on their house and there are the same ones here. The Lieberman business is not that good, after all. Yes, of course he is a liberal Democrat but his support of us is too obvious. He could be a little critical too. We see the Bush people doing this, just to keep the people quiet. Yes, they say, see, we too are actually critical of Israel….

A. But not too critical, right?

B. No, never that. Too many pictures of dead jerks for example. We need to see more pictures of grieving Israelis, mourning lost sons and children. Can’t we get more of those? Fuck the Arabs.

A. I feel sorry for the American media. Their instincts are to defend dead Arab children…

B. But nits make lice, don’t they? Who mourns dead Israeli children?

A. I’m sure there would be more on this but not enough children are dead.

B. Not yet, anyway. But if they rocket Tel Aviv…

A. Well, then, for sure.

B. We should have pictures all ready if that happens. Do you think it will?

A. Tehran directs that part of the business. We don’t have as much inside gen on them there…

B. The fucking Russians are on their side.

A. We have always had trouble with those Slavic pricks. First weapons…

B. The Chinese assholes also do this, don’t forget.

A. No one around here will forget that, be assured. The time will come when we get them too. Say we cut off their oil from the Gulf? What then? They will dance to our tunes then, not Tehran’s.

B. If we had oil…

A. But we do not. The filthy Putin has the oil. They should get rid of him while they are at it. Our people almost had it but he forced them out.

B. They can always come back. The people here would really support this. We put our people back in after we get rid of Putin and then a guaranteed flow of oil to America.

A. And Russia is off the chessboard too.

B. They all want that badly here, too. Cheney is the strongest supporter of cutting the nuts off of Russia. The military here are against fishing in troubled waters.

A. They can’t be replaced, Bush can’t sack them all.

B. Set an example. Sack a few more of the assholes and the rest will shut up. They always do. So, send me your latest list and I’ll see what I can do here.

A .Send someone to pick it up. The mail here is awful. It will take a week if some black doesn’t steal it, throw it away or wipe his ass with it.

B. Tomorrow for sure.

A. OK. And one other matter. We feel very strongly that if the current people get kicked out in November, as it looks like they might, we owe them to help them stay right where they are. It has taken a long time and much money to get all the ducks lined up and we don’t want to have to start in again. We can generally rely on sympathy from the Democrats but they will not support any more military ventures over there. That’s for sure.

B. Then what do you suggest?

A. The terrorism card works wonders. We were going to release a statement that Arabs were going to attack an El Al plane on takeoff, with rockets….

B. Probably leftovers from the CIA businesses in Afghanistan.

A. Let’s not get into that now. But this scare would only affect flights to Israel and we don’t think it would have any impact on the election.

B. Well then, why not have these attacks aimed at American aircraft? Where would they attack from?

A. Say at the perimeter fence lines at airports. Or better still, why not a plan cooked up to smuggle explosives on board transatlantic flights to or from America? Something clever that will catch the public imagination….

B. That stupid bomb in the shoe routine?

A. Don’t knock it. It worked, didn’t it? We can always find some suckers with a bent to this we can fill up with real enthusiasm and then turn them in, complete with plans. They actually believe they are going to paradise and fuck virgins and we have another propaganda coup. Let’s give this some effort. You know, a terrified public will not want to change horses in mid stream. So far, the Rove people have a good line: If you’re against the Republicans, you’re encouraging the evil terrorists sthick.

B. Well, they did that with the alert warnings and it worked…more or less.

A. Face it, they aren’t too bright here. They ran it into the ground, had to fire Ridge and Ashcroft, one of our very best friends ever, and put those things on ice. They need to discover a huge plot but in America. You know, as you said, infiltrate a group of crazies, plant things on them, call the FBI…

B. Oh, they do that themselves. That business in Florida was pathetic…

A. But it worked, didn’t it?

B. For about ten minutes at six o’clock for about three days.

A. Well, think about it and get back to me.

B. Right.

A. What’s the situation with your two people? Are they going to be tried or not?

B. Probably not, as far as the Bush people are concerned. But it is up to the courts and we are very careful not to fuck with them. They are expected to have the charges thrown out soon…

A. Well, I’ll pray for them. I have to go now so I’ll get back to you later. Don’t forget to send someone for the list

B. OK.

(Conversation terminated)

Jerusalem at boiling point of polarisation and violence –

EU report Exclusive: Leaked report says city more divided than at any time since 1967 and calls for consideration of tougher sanctions over settlement building March 20, 2015

by Peter Beaumont in Jerusalem

The Guardian

A hard-hitting EU report on Jerusalem warns that the city has reached a dangerous boiling point of “polarisation and violence” not seen since the end of the second intifada in 2005.

Calling for tougher European sanctions against Israel over its continued settlement construction in the city – which it blames for exacerbating recent conflict – the leaked document paints a devastating picture of a city more divided than at any time since 1967, when Israeli forces occupied the east of the city.

The report has emerged amid strong indications that the Obama administration is also rethinking its approach to Israel and the Middle East peace process following the re-election of Binyamin Netanyahu as Israel’s prime minister.

According to reports in several US papers, this may include allowing the passage of a UN security council resolution restating the principle of a two-state solution.

The leaked report describes the emergence of a “vicious cycle of violence … increasingly threatening the viability of the two-state solution”, which it says has been stoked by the continuation of “systematic” settlement building by Israel in “sensitive areas” of Jerusalem.

In addition the report blames tension over the status of the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount complex as well as heavy-handed policing and punitive measures – including evictions and home demolitions by Israeli forces – for the escalating confrontation.

The document is prepared jointly every year by the heads of mission of the European countries represented in Jerusalem. The group advises EU foreign policymakers on the situation in the city while making recommendations for action.

The disclosure of the 2014 report – which suggests a series of potential punitive measures targeting extremist settlers and settlement products – comes days after Israeli elections which saw Netanyahu emerge as the decisive victor.

During the election campaign, Netanyahu vowed to continue settlement building in occupied east Jerusalem in defiance of the international community, including the EU and Washington, which strongly oppose Jewish settlement construction in Jerusalem.

Netanyahu has also been criticised in parts of the international community for appearing to suggest his opposition to the creation of a Palestinian state on the eve of the vote – comments he appeared to row back from after winning the election.

For its part Israel rejects the charge of illegal settlement building in Jerusalem, claiming the city as its “undivided capital”.

Among the recommendations in the report are:

Potential new restrictions against “known violent settlers and those calling for acts of violence as regards immigration regulations in EU member states”.Further coordinated steps to ensure consumers in the EU are able to exercise their right to informed choice in respect of settlement products in line with existing EU rules.New efforts to raise awareness among European businesses about the risks of working with settlements, and the advancement of voluntary guidelines for tourism operators to prevent support for settlement business.According to well-informed European sources, the report – now being discussed in Brussels – reflects a strong desire from European governments for additional measures against Israel over its continued settlement building, and comes at a time when Europe is confronting “the new reality” of a new and potentially more rightwing Netanyahu government.

The report also follows a period of growing frustrations in the EU over the moribund state of the peace process, which collapsed last year, and pressure to adopt a harder line over issues such as settlement building.

Since Netanyahu’s victory on Tuesday, speculation has been mounting that both the US and the EU are looking for alternative and tougher strategies to push forward the stalled peace process.

The document paints a picture of a grim year of violence in Jerusalem that claimed the lives of 19 people, a total that includes a number of Palestinians involved in deadly attacks, the highest number of deaths in recent years.

Among the most high-profile incidents last year were the kidnap and murder of a young Palestinian from an east Jerusalem neighbourhood by Jewish extremists, a number of fatal attacks by Palestinians targeting Jews with cars, and a bloody attack on Jewish worshippers praying in a synagogue.

Describing Jerusalem as “one of the most emotive and problematic issues” in the Middle East peace process, the report says: “The tensions, mistrust and violence which have accompanied developments in the city in the course of the year have reached extremely high levels.

“These developments are increasingly threatening the viability of the two-state solution and, in turn, risk precipitating further levels of polarisation and violence.” In a bleak warning the report continues: “2014 has been distinguished by a number of specific, disturbing and often violent developments” – noting a cycle of stone throwing, terror attacks and heavy-handed tactics by Israeli police which, if the root causes were not addressed, were likely to lead to “further escalation and extreme polarisation”.

“These incidents have occurred against the background of the systematic increase in settlement activity, tensions over the Haram al-Sharif and rising levels of tensions and acts of violence on both sides.” Placing part of the blame on Israel’s “unabated” policy of continued settlement construction, it adds: “The expansion of settlements has continued, including in highly sensitive areas … and [has] been followed in force by waves of demolitions and evictions.”

A second key factor identified by the report for the deteriorating security situation in Jerusalem is the continuing tensions over the Haram al Sharif/Temple Mount complex, which it blames on “serious radicalisation” on both sides.

The report notes: “Almost on a daily basis settlers and national religious activists have ascended onto the Haram al Sharif/Temple Mount under the protection of Israeli forces.”

Although the report concedes that Israel has reduced the size of these groups by two-thirds at the end of last year, and eased restrictions in place during parts of last year on Muslim worshippers, it warned that the perception still exists among Palestinians of a desire on Israel’s part to change the longstanding and sensitive status quo.

A third factor the report identifies as fuelling polarisation is the heavy-handed policing of Palestinian areas of east Jerusalem, where additional Israeli forces sent to quell disturbances “have been engaged in recurrent violent confrontations with Palestinian youth that led to more than 1,300 arrests (with 40% of the detainees being minors)”.

The disclosure of the EU report follows hard on the heels of a letter sent by chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat to Federica Mogherini, the EU’s top representative on foreign policy, calling on the European Union to take a tougher stance against Israel.

In the letter Erekat demanded: “We believe it is time to focus all our efforts in saving the two-state solution from its total disappearance through holding Israel accountable of its violations of international law.”

White House Antagonism Toward Netanyahu Grows

March 20, 2015

by Julie Hirschfeld Davis

New York Times

WASHINGTON — The White House is stepping up its antagonism toward Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu despite his victory in this week’s elections, signaling that it is in no rush to repair a historic rift between the United States and Israel.

The sharpened tone indicates that the Obama administration may be re-evaluating its relationship with its closest ally in the Middle East, having lost patience with Mr. Netanyahu in the closing days of an election campaign in which he spotlighted deep disagreements with President Obama over a Palestinian state and a nuclear deal with Iran.

“You reach a tipping point,” said Daniel C. Kurtzer, a former American ambassador to Israel and Egypt. “It’s the culmination of six and a half years of frustration, including some direct hits at the president’s prestige and the office of the presidency.”

The aggressiveness underlines a calculation by Mr. Obama that an international accord with Iran to rein in its nuclear program is within reach despite Mr. Netanyahu’s adamant opposition, and that there is little value in being more conciliatory toward him.

And, domestically, the administration is risking the alienation of a core Democratic constituency of Jewish voters, in part banking on the fact that many of them also are upset with Mr. Netanyahu.

“In a way, the administration has already won,” said Aaron David Miller, a former Middle East adviser to Democratic and Republican administrations. “If you get agreement by the end of March, it will be historic in nature, it will have demonstrated that the administration is prepared to willfully stand up to Republican opposition in Congress and to deal with members of its own party who have doubts, and has withstood Israeli pressure.”

In a congratulatory call to Mr. Netanyahu on Thursday that Mr. Obama waited two days to place, the president chided the prime minister for his pre-election declaration that no Palestinian state would be established on his watch.

Although Mr. Netanyahu has since tried to backtrack on those comments, Mr. Obama said that they had nonetheless forced his administration to reassess certain aspects of its policy toward Israel, according to a White House official who offered details of the call only on the condition of anonymity.

For the second consecutive day on Friday, the White House publicly questioned Mr. Netanyahu’s sincerity about the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, suggesting that Mr. Obama did not trust him to back Palestinian statehood, a central element of United States policy in the Middle East.

Asked why the president did not take the prime minister at his word about his support for a two-state solution, Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, quickly shot back: “Well, I guess the question is, which one?”

“The divergent comments of the prime minister legitimately call into question his commitment to this policy principle and his lack of commitment to what has been the foundation of our policy-making in the region,” Mr. Earnest said.

Continue reading the main story He said Mr. Netanyahu had raised questions about his “true view” on a two-state solution. “Words matter,” Mr. Earnest said.

On the call between the two leaders, the president also discussed the prime minister’s Election Day comments about Israeli Arabs’ going to the polls in “droves,” which were interpreted widely as an attempt to suppress the Arab vote and prompted outrage in Mr. Obama’s administration and around the world.

The tense conversation came on the same day the White House announced that Denis R. McDonough, Mr. Obama’s chief of staff, would deliver the keynote address on Monday to the annual conference of J Street, a pro-Israel group aligned with Democrats that has been fiercely critical of Mr. Netanyahu.

The moves confirmed that instead of acting quickly to smooth over tensions with Mr. Netanyahu that burst to the fore in the weeks running up to the Israeli elections, the White House is stoking the acrimony.

What is less clear is whether the approach will lead to a lasting policy shift or was merely a public round of venting.

“You have a dysfunctional and unproductive relationship which is being played out publicly, and you’re now at the point where there are two options, meltdown or dial-down,” Mr. Miller said.

So far, the White House has stopped short of concrete action to challenge Mr. Netanyahu, such as calling on him to remove his ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer. An American-born former Republican operative, Mr. Dermer angered the administration when he helped congressional Republicans arrange, without the White House’s knowledge, the prime minister’s speech to Congress this month denouncing Mr. Obama’s efforts to strike a nuclear deal with Iran.

Mr. Earnest said on Friday that it was up to Mr. Netanyahu to decide who should represent Israel in the United States, and that the White House would maintain an “open line of communication” as it reassessed its policy.

Mark Regev, Mr. Netanyahu’s spokesman, said on Friday that the prime minister “couldn’t be prouder” of Mr. Dermer, in whom he had “full confidence.”Jeremy Ben-Ami, J Street’s executive director, said the Obama administration’s refusal to allow Mr. Netanyahu to backtrack on his comments against a Palestinian state was appropriate, saying such statements should have consequences.“In his actions, he’s not actually doing anything to repair the wound or to heal the wound that was opened by his and the ambassador’s actions,” Mr. Ben-Ami said of Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Dermer.

At the same time, Mr. Ben-Ami added, the rift between Mr. Obama and Mr. Netanyahu “is built on policy and substantive disagreement, and there’s no erasing that.”Administration officials have suggested that they may now agree to passage of a United Nations Security Council resolution embodying the principles of a two-state solution based on Israel’s 1967 borders and mutually agreed exchanges of territory, a step that would be anathema to Mr. Netanyahu.But Mr. Obama assured Mr. Netanyahu in the phone call on Thursday that the United States placed a high priority on its security cooperation with Israel, which receives more than $3 billion a year in American military aid. On Friday, Mr. Earnest said the reassessment of policy that Mr. Obama envisions would not threaten that cooperation.The schism has exacerbated tension between the White House and the most powerful American pro-Israel group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, with which sitting presidents have traditionally been in lock step. Aipac, which like Mr. Netanyahu is vehemently opposed to the emerging nuclear agreement with Iran, on Friday said the onus was on the White House to repair the breach.“Unfortunately, administration spokespersons rebuffed the prime minister’s efforts to improve the understandings between Israel and the U.S.,” the group said in a statement.“In contrast to their comments,” the statement continued, “we urge the administration to further strengthen ties with America’s most reliable and only truly democratic ally in the Middle East. A solid and unwavering relationship between the U.S. and Israel is in the national security interests of both countries and reflects the values that we both cherish.”

Jodi Rudoren contributed reporting from Jerusalem.

A Knife in the Dark: A Brief History of Israeli Espionage against the U.S.

by Craig Gottlieb

Between 1998 and early 2001, more than 200 Israeli nationals were arrested or detained inside the United States, on a variety of visa violations and other nominally petty violations, including low-level drug trafficking. The majority of these detainees claimed they were Israeli art students, peddling art work to cover their college tuitions; or were toy vendors, employed by an Israeli-owned Miami Beach company, Quality Sales Corporation, which investigations link to Israel’s equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency.

The emerging pattern of surveillance of American government facilities, and established links to suspected Arab and Islamic terrorist cells prior to September 11, by these Israeli nationals, set off alarm bells, following the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Prior to September 11, a series of highly-classified government memos had been circulated by the CIA and the NSA, pronouncing this Israeli espionage operation a major national security problem.

Israel is not a friend of the United States. This is because Israel runs one of the most aggressive and damaging espionage networks targeting the US. The fact of Israeli penetration into the country is not a subject that is ever discussed in the media or in the circles of governance, due to the extreme sensitivity of the US-Israel relationship coupled with the burden of the Israel lobby, which punishes legislators who dare to criticize the Jewish state. . .

In 2005 the FBI noted that Israel maintains “an active program to gather proprietary information within the United States.” A key Israeli method, said the FBI report, is computer intrusion. In 1996, the Defense Intelligence Service, a branch of the Pentagon, issued a warning that “the collection of scientific intelligence in the United States [is] the third highest priority of Israeli Intelligence after information on its Arab neighbors and information on secret US policies or decisions relating to Israel.” In 1979, the Central Intelligence Agency produced a scathing survey of Israeli intelligence activities that targeted the US government. Like any worthy spy service, Israeli intelligence early on employed wiretaps as an effective tool, according to the CIA report. In 1954, the US Ambassador in Tel Aviv discovered in his office a hidden microphone “planted by the Israelis,” and two years later telephone taps were found in the residence of the US military attaché. In a telegram to Washington, the ambassador at the time cabled a warning: “Department must assume that all conversations [in] my office are known to the Israelis.” The former ambassador to Qatar, Andrew Killgore, who also served as a foreign officer in Jerusalem and Beirut, stated that Israeli taps of US missions and embassies in the Middle East were part of a “standard operating procedure.”

According to the 1979 CIA report, the Israelis, while targeting political secrets, also devoted “a considerable portion of their covert operations to obtaining scientific and technical intelligence.” These operations involved, among other machinations, “attempts to penetrate certain classified defense projects in the United States.” The penetrations, according to the CIA report, were effected using “deep cover enterprises,” which the report described as “firms and organizations, some specifically created for, or adaptable to, a specific objective.” . . .

The agency, called the Office of Special Plans (OSP), was set up by the defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to second-guess CIA information and operated under the patronage of hard-line conservatives in the top rungs of the administration, the Pentagon and at the White House, including Vice-President Dick Cheney.

As the most powerful man in the White House, Cheney was deeply involved in the intelligence field and made three trips to the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, to demand a more ‘forward-leaning interpretation’ of information relating to the possibility that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. That there were no such weapons and that the CIA so advised the Vice President, he refused to accept their analysis and continued to insist that they produce documents supporting his thesis. In this he was aided by his chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby (Leibowitz), The latter was later convicted of a felony and sentenced to prison. He was subsequently commuted by George W. Bush following pressure from the Israeli government.

The OSP had access to an enormous amount of “raw” intelligence which came, in part, from the CIA’s directorate of operations whose job it is to receive and evaluate incoming reports from their agents around the world.

Background of Israeli foreign and domestic intelligence:

The origin of Israeli intelligence services lies in the underground organizations that were formed to assist Aliya (Jewish immigration to Palestine), during the period of British mandate. In 1884, the Choveve Zion (the lovers of Zion) met in the Prussian city of Pinsk to constitute ideas on the return of the Jews to Palestine. Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State came out in 1896 and in the same year he convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland to consider the idea of a Jewish national homeland. In 1900, under the auspices of the fourth Zionist Congress, the Jewish National Fund was created whose task was to purchase land in Palestine. Upon the defeat of the Ottoman Empire with the Arab help, the British promised independence to the Palestinians. On the other hand, the British in 1917 issued the Balfour Declaration and pledged for the establishment of a national home for Jewish people in the land of Palestine, which later in 1922, was granted to Britain as a Òmandate’ by the League of Nations.

The Pre-1948 Waves of Jewish Immigration: The first Aliya took place from 1882-1904 and the second one from 1904-1914, both of which derived support from the World Zionist Organization, the Jewish Colonial Trust and the Jewish National Fund. During the British mandate, the Zionist underground resistance force, Haganah, had as its information arm, an organization known as Sherut Yedioth. The Sherut later came to be known as SHAI which began its worldwide operations in 1929 until an independent Israel was created in 1948. Its task was to collect political intelligence for the sake of Zionist propaganda and to infiltrate the anti-Zionist and extremist groups in Palestine as well as the neighbouring Arab countries

Two routes of immigration were open to the Jews to emigrate from Europe, one legal and the other illegal. The legal immigration was allowed by the British but the numbers were small. Between 1939-1944, Britain allowed 75,000 Jews to enter Palestine legally and after that, if it allowed more Jews to immigrate, it would do so only with the Arab consent. The Jewish agency that came into being due to the need for illegal immigration of Jews to Palestine was the Mossad le Aliyah Bet. This institution at that point incorporated ten people who worked in six countries: Switzerland, Austria, France, Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey.

And it was the duty of these agents to make false passports, arrange escape routes and charter ships to take illegal immigrants to Palestine without being detected by the British authorities

Another pre-independence agency that formed the executing arm of the Haganah was Palmach which was military in character, whereas another organization Rekhesh was involved in covert operations and arms smuggling for the underground Jewish forces that had infiltrated the Arab townships

The post-1948 agencies: After becoming an independent state the SHAI was disbanded in favour of IDF (Israeli Defence Forces). Its political department was responsible to collect intelligence worldwide. Sherut Bitachon Klali was formed as a general security service for the sake of internal security and counter-espionage, also known as SHABAK or Shin Beth in Hebrew

In 1951, Ben-Gurion initiated the Central Institute for Intelligence and Special Duties (Mossad Letafkidim Meouychadim) commonly known as Mossad. Its initial function was to assess operation feasibility of military intelligence and nomination of targets, but after the creation of Military intelligence Agaf Modiin (AMAN) in 1953, it became independent of the Military Intelligence. In 1960, when Shimon Peres was in the ministry of defense, LEKEM (the Bureau of Scientific Relations) was instituted to collect scientific and technical intelligence for technological development, specially in relation to the weapon systems

The Structure of Israeli Intelligence The Overall Structure of Israeli Intelligence Services:

With the exception of Mossad and Shin Beth, the overall structure of Israeli intelligence services can be understood as a confederation. The Israeli case displays a confederation structure at a tertiary level. In the sense that the MI is accountable to the director of military intelligence, who reports to the chief of staff, who in turn is responsible to the Minister of Defense. This bureaucratic chain of command is peculiar in a Confederation-type intelligence organization as in the case of UK. Similarly the Research and Political Handling Center through its own director is accountable to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs whereas the Special Division links up to the IG of National Police through the investigation department. And the IG, through the Ministry of Interior reports to the Prime Minister.

It is interesting to note that the Advisers on Intelligence and Anti-terrorism on one hand and the Advisers on Political and Military Matters on the other hand are directly linked with the Prime Minister, with each other and also with the Director General of Foreign Ministry and the Director of MI

The organization of Mossad and Shin Beth is a centralized one with no intermediate layer of accountability between the Directors of Mossad, Shin Beth and the Prime Minister.

The Internal Structure of Mossad: The Mossad is based in Tel Aviv with recently estimated number of about 1,200 personnel and until lately, the identity of the Mossad director was a state secret. Mossad has a total of eight departments. The director oversees the Research, Technology and Technical Operations Departments. The director also chaperons Operation Planning and Coordination, Manpower Finance Logistics and Security, Training, Collection and Political Action, and Liaison. The latter two conduct single or multiple stations in Central America, South America, Eastern Europe/USSR, Africa, Asia and Ocean, Mediterranean and the Middle East, Europe and North America. Under the Political Action and Liaison Department is known to exist the Special Operations Division which runs highly sensitive covert operations.

Lastly, the General Security Service of Israel is known as Shin Beth, which is primarily responsible for counter-espionage and internal security. Shin Beth is organized into eight operational and functional departments: Arab Affairs, Non-Arab Affairs, Protective Security, Operational Support, Technology, Interrogation and Legal Counsel, Coordination and Planning, and Administration . The first three constitute the operational division and the rest, Support Divisions. Although there is a deputy director’s office, all of the other departments are also directly responsible to the director.

Coordination of the Israeli Management Structure: The pivotal faculty of Intelligence Community in Israel is known as the Va’adat Rashei Hasherutim or simply Va’adat. The Va’adat consists of the directors of Mossad, AMAN, Shin Beth and IG Police.

It also includes the Director General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Director of the Research and Political Planning Center and the anti-terrorist advisers of the Prime Minister, political and military both. All the members of Va’adat are supposedly at parity, however, in terms of importance and power, the director of AMAN is known to eclipse the director of Mossad.

Functions of the Israeli Intelligence Agencies

1. Functions of Mossad: Mossad’s essential functions are: human intelligence collection, covert action and counter terrorism. Its primary focus is to do clandestine operations against the Arab countries as well as against other organizations throughout the world . The Mossad collects information on the leadership, disposition, morale and armaments of the Arab Military forces. Mossad monitors the Arab commercial activity in relation to weapons acquisition and attempts to sabotage the Arab states recruitment of military, economic and political experts

Although exact functional detail remains somewhat abstruse, the largest of the departments with responsibility for most espionage operations is the Department of Collections. The Political Action and Liaison Department is responsible for liaison with friendly states, as well as those states that do not have any diplomatic ties with Israel. Israeli liaison and manoeuvring between friendly and non-friendly states is amazingly professional.

It exchanges intelligence information not only with countries like the US with whom it has formal ties, but also with states as diverse as Egypt, Pakistan, Iran and India. It provided Pakistan some information on India that was obtained by the Israeli agent in the US, Jonathan ‘Jay’ Pollard, in return for some strategic information about some other countries. At the same time Israel exchanged information with India about the Pakistan’s endeavours to construct the atom bomb

The Special Operations Division or Metsada conducts highly sensitive assassinations, engages in sabotage, paramilitary operations and psychological warfare projects. Among the least violent functions of Mossad is its liaison, propaganda and training. About ten Israeli agents trained nearly one hundred Sri Lankans in intelligence tactics in order to combat the Tamil Separatists in Northern Sri Lanka. Among the more violent functions of Mossad are kidnapping and assassinations. Colonel Mustapha Hafez, an Egyptian intelligence officer was killed by Mossad as he was considered a key element in the organization of the Palestinians . In 1972, in Munich, Germany the Black September faction of PLO kidnapped and subsequently killed ten Israeli athletes in an attempt to recover two hundred Palestinian prisoners held in Israel. This started the most extensive set of assassinations undertaken by the Mossad. The Mossad set up a special unit called the Wrath of God to carry out this operation which it successfully completed by eliminating its targets one by one

Lohamah Psichologit or the LAP Department of Mossad operates for its psychological warfare, propaganda and deception operations. The Research Department produces the intelligence in form of daily reports, situation reports, weekly summaries and detailed monthly reports from its different geographical desks

One of the very important functions of Mossad besides gathering intelligence is the acquisition of military hardware, the assessment of enemy equipment and the enhancement of Israeli capabilities. One of Mossad’s most successful acquisitions was the theft of highly enriched Uranium from an American company, Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corp., located in Apollo, Pennsylvania . This took place in 1965. The president of the company stated that 386.1 pounds of Uranium, enough for at least ten atom bombs, was simply lost! However, the experts believed that it was transferred to Israel.

2. Functions of Shin Beth: The Arab Affairs Department conducts anti-terrorist operations, maintenance of an index on Arab terrorists and it also performs political subversion. Whereas the non-Arab department, which is divided into Communist and non-Communist sub-sections, is responsible for the functions of penetration of foreign intelligence organizations, diplomatic missions in Israel and interrogation of Jewish immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe. The Protective Security Branch of Shin Beth functions as the guardian of all the state buildings, embassies, defense related industries, scientific installations, industrial plants and the national airline .

All foreigners are regarded with suspicion by the Shin Beth, regardless of nationality and religion. Informants are recruited from professions of hospitality industry, educational institutions and trade unions with occupations such as bartenders, telephone operators, secretaries, prostitutes and taxi drivers

3. The Functions of AMAN: The Military Intelligence of Israel produces comprehensive national intelligence estimates for the prime minister and cabinet, which includes communications intercepts, target studies on the contact Arab states in propinquity, and intelligence on the risk of war AMAN’s Foreign Relations Department maintains liaison with the foreign intelligence organizations, engages in deep reconnaissance and conducts cross-border operations

4. Air Force Intelligence and the Naval Intelligence: The Air Force Intelligence performs the function of data collection by the means of aerial reconnaissance and signals intelligence using a variety of intelligence equipment which also includes the use of RPVs (remotely piloted vehicles), which are recoverable and recyclable after first use. These devices are excellent for photographic information which can be directly transmitted to the commander’s headquarters who can make immediate decisions regarding troop deployment without sending out the ground reconnaissance

The Naval intelligence is a small service which provides AMAN on a consultative basis, assessments of the sea-based threats to Israel. Its targeting department is also responsible for coastal studies, naval gunfire missions and beach studies for amphibious assaults .

1947. Information obtained by the Jewish-owned Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in its spy operations on US citizens is used by the House Select Committee on Unamerican Activities. Subcommittee Chair Clare Hoffman dismissed the ADL’s reports on suspected communists as mere hearsay, often malicious and manipulative.

1950 John Davitt, former chief of the Justice Department’s internal security section notes that the Israeli intelligence service is the second most active in the United States after the Soviets.

1954 A hidden microphone planted by the Israelis is discovered in the Office of the US Ambassador in Tel Aviv.

1956 Telephone taps are found connected to two telephones in the residence of the US military attach in Tel Aviv.

1954 “The Lavon Affair”. Israeli agents recruited Egyptian citizens of Jewish descent to bomb Western targets in Egypt, and plant evidence to frame Arabs, in an apparent attempt to upset US-Egyptian relations. Israeli defense minister Pinchas Lavon is eventually removed from office, though many think real responsibility lay with David Ben-Gurion.

1967 Israel attacks the USS Liberty, a CIA intelligence- gathering vessel flying a US flag, operating at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, killing 34 crew members.. In 2004, Captain Ward Boston, Senior Legal Counsel for the Navy’s Court of Inquiry into the attack swears under oath that President Lyndon Johnson ordered the investigation to conclude that the deliberate assault was an “unfortunate accident,” even though the evidence indicates the attack was deliberate. Given the use by Israel of unmarked boats and planes, and the machine-gunning of USS Liberty’s lifeboats, the most likely explanation is that USS Liberty was to be sunk with all hands, with evidence left to frame Egypt for the sinking. This would have dragged the US into the war on Israel’s side.

1970 While working for Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, Richard Perle is caught by the FBI giving classified information to Israel. Nothing is done.

1978, Stephen Bryen, then a Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffer, is overheard in a DC hotel offering confidential documents to top Israeli military officials. Bryen obtains a lawyer, Nathan Lewin, and the case heads for the grand jury, but is mysteriously dropped. Bryen later goes to work for Richard Perle.

1979Shin Beth tries to penetrate the US Consulate General in Jerusalem through a “Honey Trap”, using a clerical employee who was having an affair with a Jerusalem girl.

1984 Jonathan ‘Jay’ Pollard, a graduate of Stanford University and an employee of the Naval Investigative Service (NIS) surface ships division was accused and convicted of stealing over a million highly sensitive documents and selling them to the Israeli government. As an example, Pollard stole and copied the latest version of Radio-Signal Notations (RASIN), a 10-volume manual comprehensively detailing America’s global electronic surveillance network. Pollard was sentenced to life in prison on one count of espionage on March 4, 1987. Pollard is federal prisoner #09185-016 and is incarcerated at the Butner Federal Correction Complex in Butner, North Carolina. There is absolutely no possibility he will be released from US custody.

1985 The New York Times reports the FBI is aware of at least a dozen incidents in which American officials transferred classified information to the Israelis, quoting [former Assistant Director of the F.B.I.] Mr. [Raymond] Wannal. The Justice Department does not prosecute.

1992 Stephen Bryen, caught offering confidential documents to Israel in 1978, is serving on board of the pro-Israeli Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs while continuing as a paid consultant — with security clearance — on exports of sensitive US technology.

1992 “The Samson Option,” by Seymour M. Hersh reports, illicitly obtained intelligence was flying so voluminously from LAKAM into Israeli intelligence that a special code name, JUMBO, was added to the security markings already on the documents. There were strict orders, Ari Ben-Menashe recalled: “Anything marked JUMBO was not supposed to be discussed with your American counterparts.”

1993. The ADL is caught operating a massive spying operation on critics of Israel, Arab-Americans, the San Francisco Labor Council, ILWU Local, Oakland Educational Association, NAACP, Irish Northern Aid, International Indian Treaty Council, the Asian Law Caucus and the San Francisco police. Data collected was sent directly to Israel via their Embassy and in some cases to South Africa. Pressure from Jewish organizations forced San Francisco authorities to drop the criminal case, but the ADL settles a civil lawsuit for an undisclosed sum of cash.

1995 The Defense Investigative Service circulated a memo warning US military contractors that ” Israel aggressively collects [ US] military and industrial technology.” The report stated that Israel obtains information using “ethnic targeting, financial aggrandizement, and identification and exploitation of individual frailties” of US citizens.

1996 A General Accounting Office report “Defense Industrial Security: Weaknesses in US Security Arrangements With Foreign-Owned Defense Contractors” found that according to intelligence sources “Country A” (identified by intelligence sources as Israel, Washington Times, 2/22/96) “conducts the most aggressive espionage operation against the United States of any US ally.” The Jerusalem Post (8/30/96) quoted the report, “Classified military information and sensitive military technologies are high-priority targets for the intelligence agencies of this country.” The report described “An espionage operation run by the intelligence organization responsible for collecting scientific and technologic information for [ Israel] paid a US government employee to obtain US classified military intelligence documents.” The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (Shawn L. Twing, April 1996) noted that this was “a reference to the 1985 arrest of Jonathan Pollard, a civilian US naval intelligence analyst who provided Israel’s LAKAM [Office of Special Tasks] espionage agency an estimated 800,000 pages of classified US intelligence information.”

The GAO report also noted that “Several citizens of [Israel] were caught in the United States stealing sensitive technology used in manufacturing artillery gun tubes.”

1996 An Office of Naval Intelligence document, “Worldwide Challenges to Naval Strike Warfare” reported that ” US technology has been acquired [by China] through Israel in the form of the Lavi fighter and possibly SAM [surface-to-air] missile technology.” Jane’s Defense Weekly (2/28/96) noted that “until now, the intelligence community has not openly confirmed the transfer of US technology [via Israel] to China.” The report noted that this “represents a dramatic step forward for Chinese military aviation.” (Flight International, 3/13/96)

1997 An Army mechanical engineer, David A. Tenenbaum, “inadvertently” gives classified military information on missile systems and armored vehicles to Israeli officials (New York Times, 2/20/97).

1997 The Washington Post reports US intelligence has intercepted a conversation in which two Israeli officials had discussed the possibility of getting a confidential letter that then-Secretary of State Warren Christopher had written to Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat. One of the Israelis, identified only as Dov, had commented that they may get the letter from Mega, the code name for Israel’s top agent inside the United States.

1997 US ambassador to Israel, Martin Indyk, complains privately to the Israeli government about heavy-handed surveillance by Israeli intelligence agents.

1997 Israeli agents place a tap on Monica Lewinsky’s phone at the Watergate and record phone sex sessions between her and President Bill Clinton. The Ken Starr report confirms that Clinton warned Lewinsky their conversations were being taped and ended the affair. At the same time, the FBI’s hunt for Mega is called off. Mega is later revealed to be a personal friend and family connection of Hillary Clinton.

2001 It is discovered that US drug agent’s communications have been penetrated. Suspicion falls on two companies, AMDOCS and Comverse Infosys, both owned by Israelis. AMDOCS generates billing data for most US phone companies and is able to provide detailed logs of who is talking to whom. Comverse Infosys builds the tapping equipment used by law enforcement to eavesdrop on all American telephone calls, but suspicion forms that Comverse, which gets half of its research and development budget from the Israeli government, has built a back door into the system that is being exploited by Israeli intelligence and that the information gleaned on US drug interdiction efforts is finding its way to drug smugglers. The investigation by the FBI leads to the exposure of the largest foreign spy ring ever uncovered inside the United States, operated by Israel. Half of the suspected spies have been arrested when 9-11 happens. On 9-11, five Israelis are arrested for dancing and cheering while the World Trade Towers collapse. Supposedly employed by Urban Moving Systems, the Israelis are caught with multiple passports and a lot of cash. Two of them are later revealed to be Mossad. As witness reports track the activity of the Israelis, it emerges that they were seen at Liberty Park at the time of the first impact, suggesting a foreknowledge of what was to come. The Israelis are interrogated, and then eventually sent back to Israel. The owner of the moving company used as a cover by the Mossad agents abandoned his business and fled to Israel. The United States Government then classifies all of the evidence related to the Israeli agents and their connections to 9-11. All of this is reported to the public via a four part story on Fox News by Carl Cameron. Pressure from Jewish groups, primarily AIPAC, forces Fox News to remove the story from their website. Two hours prior to the 9-11 attacks, Odigo, an Israeli company with offices just a few blocks from the World Trade Towers, received an advance warning via the internet. The manager of the New York Office provided the FBI with the IP address of the sender of the message, which turned out to be located in the Israeli Embassy in Washington, hence could not be further investigated.

2001 The Jewish Defense League’s Irv Rubin arrested for planning to bomb a US Congressman. He was murdered in the LA County Jail dies before he could be brought to trial.

2001 The Isreali Mossad, in conjunction with senior members of the Bush administration, penetrated a Saudi terrorist group located at Hollywood, Florida, and materially assisted them in preparing for an aerial assault on various significant American targets. The White House was kept fully courant of the Mossad’s actions by the Israeli Embassy personnel in Washington.

2002 The DEA issues a report that Israeli spies, posing as art students, had aggressively been trying to penetrate US Government offices.

2002 Police near the Whidbey Island Naval Air Station in southern Washington State stop a suspicious truck and detain two Israelis, one of whom is illegally in the United States. The two men were driving at high speed in a Ryder rental truck, which they claimed had been used to “deliver furniture.” The next day, police discovered traces of TNT and RDX military-grade plastic explosives inside the passenger cabin and on the steering wheel of the vehicle. The FBI then announces that the tests that showed explosives were false positives by cigarette smoke, a claim test experts say is ridiculous. Based on an alibi provided by a woman, the case is closed and the Israelis are handed over to INS to be sent back to Israel. One week later, the woman who provided the alibi vanishes.

2003 The Police Chief of Cloudcroft, New Mexico, stops a truck speeding through a school zone. The drivers turn out to be Israelis with expired passports. Claiming to be movers, the truck contains junk furniture and several boxes. The Israelis are handed over to immigration. The contents of the boxers are not revealed to the public. It is later revealed that they contain “extensive documentation” concerning earlier atomic weapon’s testings at nearby Alamagordo, NM

2003 Israel deployed assassination squads into other countries, including the United States. The US Government does not officially protest when they were informed by the Israeli Embassy that these squads were intended to kill known Muslim terrorists possibly operating inside the United States.

2004 Police near the Nuclear Fuel Services plant in Tennessee stop a truck after a three mile chase, during which the driver throws a bottle containing a strange liquid from the cab. The drivers turn out to be Israelis using fake Ids. The FBI refuses to investigate and, on orders from the Department of Justice in Washington, the Israelis are released.

2004, The authoritative Jane’s Intelligence Group noted that Israel’s intelligence organizations “have been spying on the US and running clandestine operations since Israel was established.” The former deputy director of counterintelligence at FBI, Harry B. Brandon, last year told Congressional Quarterly magazine that “the Israelis are interested in commercial as much as military secrets.”

2005 August 4, 2005 a federal grand jury indicted Lawrence Franklin a former United States Department of Defense employee, on five charges of violating the Espionage Act of 1917 in that Franklin passed secret information regarding United States policy towards Iran to staff members of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) Franklin, pled guilty to several espionage-related charges and was sentenced in January 2006 to nearly 13 years of prison but was later released due to pressure from the Israeli government.

2009: October 20, 2009 Stewart Nozette, a scientist who worked for NASA and had a top-level government security clearance, is charged with trying to sell US secrets to Israel after an FBI sting operation. The FBI pretended to be Mossad agents.

2010: A massive ecstasy trafficking operation, delivering hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal drugs, manufactured in the Netherlands, to cities across the United States. The drug trafficking operation is also engaged in black market diamond smuggling, using Hassidic Jews as couriers.

Portions of the funds garnered from the illegal operations, according to sources, were funneled to offshore bank accounts of former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, now in a vegetative state in an Israeli hospital. Some of these dirty funds were reportedly diverted to Sharon’s election campaigns. This Israeli mafia apparatus receives technical support via a number of Israeli communications firms, that subcontract with major American telephone companies and government law enforcement agencies.

Spy operations, targeted at mosques and other centers of the Islamic-American communities. According to sources, the goal is to foment nominally “Arab” or “Islamic” labeled violence and terrorism inside the United States, to win Bush Administration support for an Israeli war against the Palestinians and Arabs. These sources believe further, Israeli-abetted terror attacks are to be expected.

Surveillance of U.S. government law enforcement, military and intelligence facilities, to gather profile information for such terrorist attacks, as well as espionage penetration. Organized teams of young, “recently retired” Israeli Defense Force soldiers, often associated with specialty units engaged in electronic signal intercepts and explosive ordinance, have targeted at least 36 domestic U.S. military bases, and many federal law enforcement and intelligence installations. A second feature of this targeting of USG facilities is the recruitment of “a new generation of Jonathan Pollards” (Israeli spies). (To be continued: coming next developments from 2003 to 2015)

GOOGLE ADSENSE SPYING

Publishers of websites who participate in Google’s Adsense monetisation

program should keep a close eye on visitor logs.

Several covert IP addresses are used by Google’s policy compliance

investigators.

If you see any of these visiting your web pages, you are about to get a

]]>0adminhttp://www.tbrnews.org/?p=9782015-03-14T21:15:28Z2015-03-14T21:15:28ZThe Voice of the White House

Washington, D.C. March 14, 2015: “Both the Russian, Ukrainian and US people make up all kinds of stories. The Ukrainians are absolutely the worst and the US is second.

Putin plays a close hand.
Note the hysterical jabbering in the US when Putin was out of sight for a few days?
I know where he was and what he was doing but the US intelligence doesn’t have a clue. They will find out soon enough.
And the precious euro is tanking now at a rapid rate. Once worth $1.40 it has fallen to $.95!

And is going to fall further, believe me.
I told a good friend, living in Paris, to dump all his euros about two months ago and he did, nearly a million dollars worth.
And now my friend is having a fit laughing.
Here comes the Mark, there goes Poland, down the drain!
And where ever did Putin vanish to?
Seek out the brilliant and well-informed Gordon Duff and find out the Real Truth!

And I am very careful about linking to sites I do not know.
Many of them, though not all, are traps for the unwary.
For example, a pro-ISIS site is set up to attract potential recruits and an anti-FBI site to attract potential trouble-makers.
The American government is none too subtle about this but then the general public here is really stupid and gullible.
If the law enforcement people can’t find real bad people, they try to encourage potentials to involve themselves and then try to get them on tape, via an informer, to agree to some outrageous and illegal plot.
Then the FBI arrests ten fifteen year-old boys and crows in the friendly New York Times that they have “just broken a major terrorist link planning to blow up” the Statue of Liberty or some New York subway station.

US military and intelligence computer networks

March 11, 2015

blogspot.com

From the Snowden revelations we learned not only about NSA data collection projects, but also about many software tools that are used to analyze and search those data. These programs run on secure computer networks, isolated from the public internet. Here we will provide an overview of these networks that are used by the US military and US intelligence agencies.

Besides computer networks, they also use a number of dedicated telephone networks, but gradually these are transferred from traditional circuit-switched networks to Voice over IP (VoIP). This makes it possible to have only one IP packet-switched network for both computer and phone services. It seems that for example NSA’s NSTS phone system is now fully IP-based.

US national networks

The main US military and intelligence computer networks are (of course) only accessible for authorized personnel from the United States. Special security measures are in place to prevent interception by foreign intelligence agencies. Most of the tools and programs used by NSA run on JWICS and NSANet, but here we only mention them when this is confirmed by documents.

- Secured by: Network traffic monitored by the TUTELAGE program and QUANTUM-DNS at gateways

- Address format: http://subdomains.domain.mil

- Access: US military users, via Common Access Card smart card *

- Number of users: ca. 4,000,000

- Purpose: Combat support applications for the US Department of Defense (DoD), Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), Military Departments (MILDEPS), Combatant Commands (COCOM), and senior leadership; composed of the unclassified networks of the DoD; provides protected access to the public internet.

- Purpose: Supporting the Global Command and Control System (GCCS), the Defense Message System (DMS), collaborative planning and numerous other classified warfighter applications, and as such DoD’s largest interoperable command and control data network.

These various military and intelligence networks run on a world-wide physical infrastructure that is called the Defense Information Systems Network (DISN), which is maintained by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) and consists of landline, mobile, radio and satellite communication links

Most of these communication links are not connected to the public internet, but because radio and satellite transmissions can easily be intercepted by foreign countries, the security of these networks is assured by encryption. This encryption can also be used to run higher classified traffic over communication links with a lower classification level through Virtual Private Network (VPN) tunnels.

Classified communications have to be protected by Suite A Cryptography, which contains very strong and classified encryption algorithms. On most networks this is implemented by using Type 1 certified TACLANE (KG-175A/D) in-line network encryptors made by General Dynamics:

As long there’s the appropriate strong link encryption, only the end points with the computer terminals (where data are processed before they are encrypted) need strict physical and digital security requirements in order to prevent any kind of eavesdropping or interception by foreign adversaries.

Most American military bases are connected to the SIPRNET backbone, but for tactical users in the field, the SIPRNet and JWICS networks can extend to mobile sites through Satellite Communications (SATCOM) links, like for example TROJAN SPIRIT and TROJAN SPIRIT LITE, which consist of a satellite terminal that can be on a pallet, in a shelter, on a trailer or even connected to a transit case.

Other US goverment departments and intelligenc agencies also have their own computer networks at different classification levels:

Finally, there’s the Capitol Network (CapNet, formerly known as Intelink-P), which provides Congressional intelligence consumers with connectivity to Intelink-TS and CIASource, the latter being the CIA’s primary dissemination vehicle for both finished and unfinished intelligence reports.

US multinational networks

Besides the aforementioned networks that are only accessible for authorized military and intelligence personnel from the United States, there are also computer networks set up by the US for multinational coalitions, and which therefore can also be used by officials from partner countries.

The group of countries that have access to such coalition networks is often denoted by a number of “Eyes” corresponding with the number of countries that participate.

Besides NSANet as its general purpose intranet, NSA also operates several other computer networks, for example for hacking operations conducted by the TAO-division. We can see some of these networks in the following diagram, which shows how data go (counter-clockwise) from a bot in a victim’s computer on the internet, through a network codenamed WAITAUTO to TAONet and from there through a TAONet/NSANet DeMilitarized Zone (DMZ) to data repositories and analysing tools on NSANet:

For communications among the members of multinational coalitions, the United States provides computer networks called Combined Enterprise Regional Information eXchange System (CENTRIXS). These are secure wide area network (WAN) architectures which are established according to the specific demands of a particular coalition exercise or operation.

CENTRIXS enables the secure sharing of intelligence and operational information at the level of SECRET REL TO [country/coalition designator] and also provides selected centralized services, like Active Directory/DNS Roots, VoIP, WSUS and Anti-Virus Definitions.

There are more than 40 CENTRIXS networks and communities of interest (COIs) in which the 28 NATO members and some 80 other countries participate. The best-known CENTRIXS networks are:

- Purpose: Supporting multinational information exchange among the ships of coalition partners of the US Navy to provide access to critical, time-sensitive planning and support data necessary to carry out the mission

A sensitive leak investigation of a former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has stalled amid concerns that a prosecution in federal court could force the government to confirm a joint U.S.-Israeli covert operation targeting Iran, according to current and former U.S. officials.

Federal investigators suspect that retired Marine Gen. James E. “Hoss” Cartwright leaked to a New York Times reporter details about a highly classified operation to hobble Iran’s nuclear enrichment capability through cyber-sabotage — an effort not acknowledged by Israel or the United States.

Prosecutors will have to overcome significant national security and diplomatic concerns if they want to move forward, including pitting the Obama administration against Israel if that ally were opposed to any information about the cyber-operation being revealed in court.

The United States could move forward with the case against Israel’s ­wishes, but such a move might further harm relations between two countries, which are already frayed because of a disagreement over how best to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.

Administration officials also fear that any revelations could complicate the current negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program.

“There are always legitimate national security reasons for not proceeding in one of these ­cases,” said John L. Martin, who handled many sensitive espionage investigations as a former Justice Department prosecutor.

The case captures the tension between national security concerns and the desire of prosecutors to hold high-ranking officials to account for leaking classified secrets. The Obama administration has been the most aggressive in U.S. history in pursuing those suspected of leaking classified information.

The Justice Department has offered no clues to whether it intends to proceed with a case against Cartwright, who helped design the cyber-campaign against Iran under President George W. Bush and was involved in its escalation under President Obama.

Spokesmen for the Justice Department, the White House and the FBI declined to comment for this article.

Gregory B. Craig, Cartwright’s attorney and a former White House counsel in the Obama administration, said he has had no contact with prosecutors for more than a year.

“General Cartwright has done nothing wrong,” Craig said. “He has devoted his entire life to defending the United States. He would never do anything to weaken our national defense or undermine our national security. Hoss Cartwright is a national treasure, a genuine hero and a great patriot.”

In discussions with the office of the White House counsel, then led by Kathryn Ruemmler, prosecutors sought to determine whether the White House would be willing to declassify material important to the case. Ruemmler was unwilling to provide the documentation, citing security concerns, including those relating to sources­ and methods, said a person familiar with the matter.

Ruemmler, who left the post in June, declined to comment.

“There’s a fundamental tension in cases­­ like this between the needs of a criminal prosecution and the needs of national security,” said Jason Weinstein, a former deputy assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, who was not briefed on the investigation. “Where that comes to a head is when prosecutors want to use evidence in a courtroom that is highly classified and very sensitive.”

It is often the case that the needs of a particular criminal prosecution yield to national security interests. “At the end of the day,” Weinstein said, “if you can’t use the evidence you need in court, you can’t bring the case.”

Details of the joint program, including its code name, Olympic Games, were revealed by Times reporter David E. Sanger in a book and article in June 2012. The sabotage of Iranian nuclear centrifuges by the computer worm dubbed Stuxnet had emerged two years earlier, and security experts speculated that it was the work of the United States and Israel.

Confirmation of the joint authorship set off a political controversy, with congressional Republicans charging that the White House had deliberately leaked information to enhance Obama’s national security credentials as he sought reelection.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. assigned Rod J. Rosenstein, the U.S. attorney for Maryland, to investigate the leak. His office declined to comment.

FBI investigators focused on Cartwright in the fall of 2012, officials said. They interviewed him at least twice, according to people who are familiar with the case and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the investigation. During the first interview, Cartwright had to go to the hospital.

Part of the challenge of preparing a case like this is determining to what extent authorities who control the declassification of information, in this case the White House and the intelligence community, are willing to divulge information.

In the case of a CIA officer who was recently convicted of espionage, the government disclosed sensitive details during the leak trial about a separate operation to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program that occurred more than a decade ago. The CIA even allowed a Russian scientist who had defected and taken part in the highly classified operation to testify.

“The government’s got to make a choice: Is it more important to prosecute a national security leak or more important to preserve relationships with allies and shield sources­ and methods that protect the country?” said one individual familiar with the matter.

The case also poses opportunities for “graymail” — a situation in which defense attorneys exercise leverage that lawyers in ordinary criminal cases­ lack by forcing prosecutors to make tough judgment calls about divulging sensitive or classified information.

Craig might, for instance, push for broad discovery of information aimed at demonstrating that other officials could have been sources­ of the leak. Experts say he also could press to establish the factual basis for the information leaked, which could expose sensitive material.

Cartwright, who retired in 2011, had White House authorization to speak with reporters, according to people familiar with the matter. Craig might try to put the White House’s relationship with reporters and the use of authorized leaks on display, creating a potentially embarrassing distraction for the administration.

The case could remain open beyond the point at which national security and foreign policy concerns are an issue. Under the Espionage Act, one of the statutes that the government probably would use, prosecutors have 10 years from the date of the alleged crime to file charges.

Germany says it won’t pay Greece World War 2 reparations after Greek PM Alexis Tsipras said Berlin is using legal tricks to avoid paying compensation. Germany says it’s honored its obligations, while Greece says it may start seizing German property.

Germany once again dismissed Greek demands to pay reparations for the 1941-44 Nazi occupation of Greece.

“It is our firm belief that questions of reparations and compensation have been legally and politically resolved,” said Steffen Seibert, the spokesman for German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

“We should concentrate on current issues and, hopefully, what will be a good future,” Reuters reported him as saying.

A spokesman for the finance ministry said there was no point in holding talks with the Greek government concerning the issue of reparations. The spokesman also added that the demands from Athens were just trying to distract attention away from the serious financial problems the country is facing.

With Germany refusing to budge from its position concerning the payment of war reparations, Greece’s Justice Minister said Wednesday that Athens could start seizing German assets.

Nikos Paraskevopoulos said he was “ready to approve” a Greek Supreme Court ruling in 2000 that would allow the appropriation of assets belonging to Germany’s archaeological school and the Goethe Institute. Proceeds from the property would be used to compensate the relatives of 218 civilians who were massacred by Nazi troops in a village in central Greece in June 1944.

“The law states that the minister must give the order for the Supreme Court ruling to be carried out…. I am ready to give that order,” Paraskevopoulos told Antenna TV, AFP reported.

Wednesday, Berlin rejected the renewed demands.

“It is our firm belief that questions of reparations and compensation have been legally and politically resolved,” said Steffen Seibert, the spokesman for German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

A spokesman for the finance ministry also said there was no reason to hold talks with Athens about reparations and called the demands a distraction from actual financial issues facing Greece.

The issue of war reparations dating from the 1941-44 Nazi occupation of Greece is likely to increase already heightened tensions between Athens and Berlin. The two countries are already squabbling over Greek demands to renegotiate the terms of a €240 billion ($260 billion) bailout. However, with Germany showing few signs of leniency, the new left-wing Syriza government has decided to raise the issue of war reparations again with Berlin.

The issue of war reparations dating from the 1941-44 Nazi occupation of Greece is likely to increase already heightened tensions between Athens and Berlin. The two countries are already squabbling over Greek demands to renegotiate the terms of a €240 billion ($260 billion) bailout. However, with Germany showing few signs of leniency, the new left-wing Syriza government has decided to raise the issue of war reparations again with Berlin.

Reichsmarks, now worth roughly $12 billion. The loan was never repaid, while Greece is also seeking further reparations from Germany due to the destruction wrought upon the nation during the Nazi occupation.

“Germany has never properly paid reparations for the damage done to Greece by the Nazi occupation,” Prime Minister Tsipras told the Greek parliament Tuesday. “The crimes carried out by the Nazis are still vivid, and we have a moral obligation to remember what the forces did to the country.”

Greece has been trying to get Germany to pay war damages for decades, but Athens has never quantified its reparation claims. The movement to get Berlin to pay up has become stronger over the last few years as Athens experiences financial hardships following austerity measures, which were a prerequisite of being given the bailout money, to stop the country from falling into financial ruin.

Tsipras says he will get a parliamentary commission to look into the matter, saying: “After the reunification of Germany in 1990, the legal and political conditions were created for this issue to be solved. But since then, German governments chose silence, legal tricks and delay.”

“And I wonder, because there is a lot of talk at the European level these days about moral issues: is this stance moral?” he said.

Berlin has flatly denied it owes Athens any more money, saying it has already settled its debts following German reunification in 1990. The “Two Plus Four” treaty, which involved East and West Germany, as well as the four occupying nations following the Second World War, France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States, saw them renounce all rights they formerly held in Germany. The document was also approved by Greece, which would effectively draw a line under any future possible claims for war reparations.

Germany says it paid Greece war damages of $25 million in the 1950s, equivalent to $220 million today, and also paid out 115 million Deutschmarks (a sum worth around $230 million today), to victims of Nazi crimes in the early 1960s.

Athens has said it always considered that money as only an initial payment and expected the rest of the money to be paid back following German reunification.

Big Oil’s Broken Business Model: The Real Story Behind the Oil Price Collapse

by Michael T. Klare

Tomgram

Many reasons have been provided for the dramatic plunge in the price of oil to about $60 per barrel (nearly half of what it was a year ago): slowing demand due to global economic stagnation; overproduction at shale fields in the United States; the decision of the Saudis and other Middle Eastern OPEC producers to maintain output at current levels (presumably to punish higher-cost producers in the U.S. and elsewhere); and the increased value of the dollar relative to other currencies. There is, however, one reason that’s not being discussed, and yet it could be the most important of all: the complete collapse of Big Oil’s production-maximizing business model.

Until last fall, when the price decline gathered momentum, the oil giants were operating at full throttle, pumping out more petroleum every day. They did so, of course, in part to profit from the high prices. For most of the previous six years, Brent crude, the international benchmark for crude oil, had been selling at $100 or higher. But Big Oil was also operating according to a business model that assumed an ever-increasing demand for its products, however costly they might be to produce and refine. This meant that no fossil fuel reserves, no potential source of supply — no matter how remote or hard to reach, how far offshore or deeply buried, how encased in rock — was deemed untouchable in the mad scramble to increase output and profits.

In recent years, this output-maximizing strategy had, in turn, generated historic wealth for the giant oil companies. Exxon, the largest U.S.-based oil firm, earned an eye-popping $32.6 billion in 2013 alone, more than any other American company except for Apple. Chevron, the second biggest oil firm, posted earnings of $21.4 billion that same year. State-owned companies like Saudi Aramco and Russia’s Rosneft also reaped mammoth profits.

How things have changed in a matter of mere months. With demand stagnant and excess production the story of the moment, the very strategy that had generated record-breaking profits has suddenly become hopelessly dysfunctional.

To fully appreciate the nature of the energy industry’s predicament, it’s necessary to go back a decade to 2005, when the production-maximizing strategy was first adopted. At that time, Big Oil faced a critical juncture. On the one hand, many existing oil fields were being depleted at a torrid pace, leading experts to predict an imminent “peak” in global oil production, followed by an irreversible decline; on the other, rapid economic growth in China, India, and other developing nations was pushing demand for fossil fuels into the stratosphere. In those same years, concern over climate change was also beginning to gather momentum, threatening the future of Big Oil and generating pressures to invest in alternative forms of energy.

A “Brave New World” of Tough Oil

No one better captured that moment than David O’Reilly, the chairman and CEO of Chevron. “Our industry is at a strategic inflection point, a unique place in our history,” he told a gathering of oil executives that February. “The most visible element of this new equation,” he explained in what some observers dubbed his “Brave New World” address, “is that relative to demand, oil is no longer in plentiful supply.” Even though China was sucking up oil, coal, and natural gas supplies at a staggering rate, he had a message for that country and the world: “The era of easy access to energy is over.”

To prosper in such an environment, O’Reilly explained, the oil industry would have to adopt a new strategy. It would have to look beyond the easy-to-reach sources that had powered it in the past and make massive investments in the extraction of what the industry calls “unconventional oil” and what I labeled at the time “tough oil”: resources located far offshore, in the threatening environments of the far north, in politically dangerous places like Iraq, or in unyielding rock formations like shale. “Increasingly,” O’Reilly insisted, “future supplies will have to be found in ultradeep water and other remote areas, development projects that will ultimately require new technology and trillions of dollars of investment in new infrastructure.”

For top industry officials like O’Reilly, it seemed evident that Big Oil had no choice in the matter. It would have to invest those needed trillions in tough-oil projects or lose ground to other sources of energy, drying up its stream of profits. True, the cost of extracting unconventional oil would be much greater than from easier-to-reach conventional reserves (not to mention more environmentally hazardous), but that would be the world’s problem, not theirs. “Collectively, we are stepping up to this challenge,” O’Reilly declared. “The industry is making significant investments to build additional capacity for future production.”

On this basis, Chevron, Exxon, Royal Dutch Shell, and other major firms indeed invested enormous amounts of money and resources in a growing unconventional oil and gas race, an extraordinary saga I described in my book The Race for What’s Left. Some, including Chevron and Shell, started drilling in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico; others, including Exxon, commenced operations in the Arctic and eastern Siberia. Virtually every one of them began exploiting U.S. shale reserves via hydro-fracking.

Only one top executive questioned this drill-baby-drill approach: John Browne, then the chief executive of BP. Claiming that the science of climate change had become too convincing to deny, Browne argued that Big Energy would have to look “beyond petroleum” and put major resources into alternative sources of supply. “Climate change is an issue which raises fundamental questions about the relationship between companies and society as a whole, and between one generation and the next,” he had declared as early as 2002. For BP, he indicated, that meant developing wind power, solar power, and biofuels.

Browne, however, was eased out of BP in 2007 just as Big Oil’s output-maximizing business model was taking off, and his successor, Tony Hayward, quickly abandoned the “beyond petroleum” approach. “Some may question whether so much of the [world’s energy] growth needs to come from fossil fuels,” he said in 2009. “But here it is vital that we face up to the harsh reality [of energy availability].” Despite the growing emphasis on renewables, “we still foresee 80% of energy coming from fossil fuels in 2030.”

Under Hayward’s leadership, BP largely discontinued its research into alternative forms of energy and reaffirmed its commitment to the production of oil and gas, the tougher the better. Following in the footsteps of other giant firms, BP hustled into the Arctic, the deep water of the Gulf of Mexico, and Canadian tar sands, a particularly carbon-dirty and messy-to-produce form of energy. In its drive to become the leading producer in the Gulf, BP rushed the exploration of a deep offshore field it called Macondo, triggering the Deepwater Horizon blow-out of April 2010 and the devastating oil spill of monumental proportions that followed.

Over the Cliff

By the end of the first decade of this century, Big Oil was united in its embrace of its new production-maximizing, drill-baby-drill approach. It made the necessary investments, perfected new technology for extracting tough oil, and did indeed triumph over the decline of existing, “easy oil” deposits. In those years, it managed to ramp up production in remarkable ways, bringing ever more hard-to-reach oil reservoirs online.

According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA) of the U.S. Department of Energy, world oil production rose from 85.1 million barrels per day in 2005 to 92.9 million in 2014, despite the continuing decline of many legacy fields in North America and the Middle East. Claiming that industry investments in new drilling technologies had vanquished the specter of oil scarcity, BP’s latest CEO, Bob Dudley, assured the world only a year ago that Big Oil was going places and the only thing that had “peaked” was “the theory of peak oil.”

That, of course, was just before oil prices took their leap off the cliff, bringing instantly into question the wisdom of continuing to pump out record levels of petroleum. The production-maximizing strategy crafted by O’Reilly and his fellow CEOs rested on three fundamental assumptions: that, year after year, demand would keep climbing; that such rising demand would ensure prices high enough to justify costly investments in unconventional oil; and that concern over climate change would in no significant way alter the equation. Today, none of these assumptions holds true.

Demand will continue to rise — that’s undeniable, given expected growth in world income and population — but not at the pace to which Big Oil has become accustomed. Consider this: in 2005, when many of the major investments in unconventional oil were getting under way, the EIA projected that global oil demand would reach 103.2 million barrels per day in 2015; now, it’s lowered that figure for this year to only 93.1 million barrels. Those 10 million “lost” barrels per day in expected consumption may not seem like a lot, given the total figure, but keep in mind that Big Oil’s multibillion-dollar investments in tough energy were predicated on all that added demand materializing, thereby generating the kind of high prices needed to offset the increasing costs of extraction. With so much anticipated demand vanishing, however, prices were bound to collapse.

Current indications suggest that consumption will continue to fall short of expectations in the years to come. In an assessment of future trends released last month, the EIA reported that, thanks to deteriorating global economic conditions, many countries will experience either a slower rate of growth or an actual reduction in consumption. While still inching up, Chinese consumption, for instance, is expected to grow by only 0.3 million barrels per day this year and next — a far cry from the 0.5 million barrel increase it posted in 2011 and 2012 and its one million barrel increase in 2010. In Europe and Japan, meanwhile, consumption is actually expected to fall over the next two years.

And this slowdown in demand is likely to persist well beyond 2016, suggests the International Energy Agency (IEA), an arm of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (the club of rich industrialized nations). While lower gasoline prices may spur increased consumption in the United States and a few other nations, it predicted, most countries will experience no such lift and so “the recent price decline is expected to have only a marginal impact on global demand growth for the remainder of the decade.”

This being the case, the IEA believes that oil prices will only average about $55 per barrel in 2015 and not reach $73 again until 2020. Such figures fall far below what would be needed to justify continued investment in and exploitation of tough-oil options like Canadian tar sands, Arctic oil, and many shale projects. Indeed, the financial press is now full of reports on stalled or cancelled mega-energy projects. Shell, for example, announced in January that it had abandoned plans for a $6.5 billion petrochemical plant in Qatar, citing “the current economic climate prevailing in the energy industry.” At the same time, Chevron shelved its plan to drill in the Arctic waters of the Beaufort Sea, while Norway’s Statoil turned its back on drilling in Greenland.

There is, as well, another factor that threatens the wellbeing of Big Oil: climate change can no longer be discounted in any future energy business model. The pressures to deal with a phenomenon that could quite literally destroy human civilization are growing. Although Big Oil has spent massive amounts of money over the years in a campaign to raise doubts about the science of climate change, more and more people globally are starting to worry about its effects — extreme weather patterns, extreme storms, extreme drought, rising sea levels, and the like — and demanding that governments take action to reduce the magnitude of the threat.

Europe has already adopted plans to lower carbon emissions by 20% from 1990 levels by 2020 and to achieve even greater reductions in the following decades. China, while still increasing its reliance on fossil fuels, has at least finally pledged to cap the growth of its carbon emissions by 2030 and to increase renewable energy sources to 20% of total energy use by then. In the United States, increasingly stringent automobile fuel-efficiency standards will require that cars sold in 2025 achieve an average of 54.5 miles per gallon, reducing U.S. oil demand by 2.2 million barrels per day. (Of course, the Republican-controlled Congress — heavily subsidized by Big Oil — will do everything it can to eradicate curbs on fossil fuel consumption.)

Still, however inadequate the response to the dangers of climate change thus far, the issue is on the energy map and its influence on policy globally can only increase. Whether Big Oil is ready to admit it or not, alternative energy is now on the planetary agenda and there’s no turning back from that. “It is a different world than it was the last time we saw an oil-price plunge,” said IEA executive director Maria van der Hoeven in February, referring to the 2008 economic meltdown. “Emerging economies, notably China, have entered less oil-intensive stages of development… On top of this, concerns about climate change are influencing energy policies [and so] renewables are increasingly pervasive.”

The oil industry is, of course, hoping that the current price plunge will soon reverse itself and that its now-crumbling maximizing-output model will make a comeback along with $100-per-barrel price levels. But these hopes for the return of “normality” are likely energy pipe dreams. As van der Hoeven suggests, the world has changed in significant ways, in the process obliterating the very foundations on which Big Oil’s production-maximizing strategy rested. The oil giants will either have to adapt to new circumstances, while scaling back their operations, or face takeover challenges from more nimble and aggressive firms.

Michael T. Klare, a TomDispatch regular, is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and the author, most recently, of The Race for What’s Left. A documentary movie version of his book Blood and Oil is available from the Media Education Foundation.

When Arseniy Yatsenyuk, Ukraine’s prime minister, told a German TV station recently that the Soviet Union invaded Germany, was this just blind ignorance? Or a kind of perverted wishful thinking? If the USSR really was the aggressor in 1941, it would suit Yatsenyuk’s narrative of current geopolitics in which Russia is once again the only side that merits blame.

When Grzegorz Schetyna, Poland’s deputy foreign minister, said Ukrainians liberated Auschwitz, did he not know that the Red Army was a multinational force in which Ukrainians certainly played a role but the bulk of the troops were Russian? Or was he looking for a new way to provoke the Kremlin?

Faced with these irresponsible distortions, and they are replicated in a hundred other prejudiced comments about Russian behaviour from western politicians as well as their eastern European colleagues, it is a relief to find a book on the Ukrainian conflict that is cool, balanced, and well sourced. Richard Sakwa makes repeated criticisms of Russian tactics and strategy, but he avoids lazy Putin-bashing and locates the origins of the Ukrainian conflict in a quarter-century of mistakes since the cold war ended. In his view, three long-simmering crises have boiled over to produce the violence that is engulfing eastern Ukraine. The first is the tension between two different models of Ukrainian statehood. One is what he calls the “monist” view, which asserts that the country is an autochthonous cultural and political unity and that the challenge of independence since 1991 has been to strengthen the Ukrainian language, repudiate the tsarist and Soviet imperial legacies, reduce the political weight of Russian-speakers and move the country away from Russia towards “Europe”. The alternative “pluralist” view emphasises the different historical and cultural experiences of Ukraine’s various regions and argues that building a modern democratic post-Soviet Ukrainian state is not just a matter of good governance and rule of law at the centre. It also requires an acceptance of bilingualism, mutual tolerance of different traditions, and devolution of power to the regions.

More than any other change of government in Kiev since 1991, the overthrow of Viktor Yanukovych last year brought the triumph of the monist view, held most strongly in western Ukraine, whose leaders were determined this time to ensure the winner takes all.

The second crisis arises from the internationalisation of the struggle inside Ukraine which turned it into a geopolitical tug of war. Sakwa argues that this stems from the asymmetrical end of the cold war which shut Russia out of the European alliance system. While Mikhail Gorbachev and millions of other Russians saw the end of the cold war as a shared victory which might lead to the building of a “common European home”, most western leaders saw Russia as a defeated nation whose interests could be brushed aside, and which must accept US hegemony in the new single-superpower world order or face isolation. Instead of dismantling Nato, the cold-war alliance was strengthened and expanded in spite of repeated warnings from western experts on Russia that this would create new tensions. Long before Putin came to power, Yeltsin had urged the west not to move Nato eastwards.

Even today at this late stage, a declaration of Ukrainian non-alignment as part of an internationally negotiated settlement, and UN Security Council guarantees of that status, would bring instant de-escalation and make a lasting ceasefire possible in eastern Ukraine.

The hawks in the Clinton administration ignored all this, Bush abandoned the anti-ballistic missile treaty and put rockets close to Russia’s borders, and now a decade later, after Russia’s angry reaction to provocations in Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine today, we have what Sakwa rightly calls a “fateful geographical paradox: that Nato exists to manage the risks created by its existence”.

The third crisis, also linked to the Nato issue, is the European Union’s failure to stay true to the conflict resolution imperative that had been its original impetus. After 1989 there was much talk of the arrival of the “hour of Europe”. Just as the need for Franco-German reconciliation inspired the EU’s foundation, many hoped the cold war’s end would lead to a broader east-west reconciliation across the old Iron Curtain. But the prospect of greater European independence worried key decision-makers in Washington, and Nato’s role has been, in part, to maintain US primacy over Europe’s foreign policy. From Bosnia in 1992 to Ukraine today, the last two decades have seen repeated occasions where US officials pleaded, half-sincerely, for a greater European role in handling geopolitical crises in Europe while simultaneously denigrating and sidelining Europe’s efforts. Last year’s “Fuck the EU” comment by Victoria Nuland, Obama’s neocon assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, was the pithiest expression of this.

Sakwa writes with barely suppressed anger of Europe’s failure, arguing that instead of a vision embracing the whole continent, the EU has become little more than the civilian wing of the Atlantic alliance.

Within the framework of these three crises, Sakwa gives the best analysis yet in book form of events on the ground in eastern Ukraine as well as in Kiev, Washington, Brussels and Moscow. He covers the disputes between the “resolvers” (who want a negotiated solution) and the “war party” in each capital.

He describes the rows over sanctions that have split European leaders, and points out how Ukraine’s president, Petro Poroshenko, is under constant pressure from Nuland’s favourite Ukrainian, the more militant Yatsenyuk, to rely on military force.

As for Putin, Sakwa sees him not so much as the driver of the crisis but as a regulator of factional interests and a temporiser who has to balance pressure from more rightwing Russian nationalists as well as from the insurgents in Ukraine, who get weapons and help from Russia but are not the Kremlin’s puppets.

Frontline Ukraine highlights several points that have become almost taboo in western accounts: the civilian casualties in eastern Ukraine caused by Ukrainian army shelling, the physical assaults on leftwing candidates in last year’s election and the failure to complete investigations of last February’s sniper activity in Kiev (much of it thought to have been by anti-Yanukovych fighters) or of the Odessa massacre in which dozens of anti-Kiev protesters were burnt alive in a building set on fire by nationalists or clubbed to death when they jumped from windows.

The most disturbing novelty of the Ukrainian crisis is the way Putin and other Russian leaders are routinely demonised. At the height of the cold war when the dispute between Moscow and the west was far more dangerous, backed as it was by the danger of nuclear catastrophe, Brezhnev and Andropov were never treated to such public insults by western commentators and politicians.

Equally alarming, though not new, is the one-sided nature of western political, media and thinktank coverage. The spectre of senator Joseph McCarthy stalks the stage, marginalising those who offer a balanced analysis of why we have got to where we are and what compromises could save us. I hope Sakwa’s book does not itself become a victim, condemned as insufficiently anti-Russian to be reviewed.

• Jonathan Steele is a former Guardian Moscow correspondent, and author of Eternal Russia: Yeltsin, Gorbachev and the Mirage of Democracy. To order Frontline Ukraine for £15.19 (RRP £18.99), go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846.

Progress Is Slow at V.A. Hospitals in Wake of Crisis

March 13, 1015

by Michael D. Shear and Dave Phillips

New York Times

PHOENIX — The nation’s largest hospital system has made only halting progress in hiring new doctors, replacing incompetent supervisors, upgrading outdated computers and rebuilding trust with veterans, nine months after President Obama concluded that a “corrosive culture” had led to systemic problems at hospitals run by the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Now, patients, veterans groups and doctors say delays in receiving care are still common, and they accuse department officials of failing to provide opportunities to see private doctors. Critics, including Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill, say far too few senior managers have been held accountable for mismanagement at the hospital in Phoenix and at others around the country.

Mr. Obama on Friday made his first visit to the department’s hospital in Phoenix since reports surfaced that officials there oversaw sham patient waiting lists used to hide long delays in appointments. Several veterans died waiting for care there. Those delays set off a political crisis last summer that led to the ouster of the department’s chief and raised questions about the government’s ability to manage the sprawling bureaucracy.

The president spoke about the need to “restore trust and confidence in the V.A. system. “Very little has changed,” Dr. Sam Foote, an internist who was one of the first whistle-blowers to reveal problems with wait times at the Phoenix hospital, said in an interview on Thursday.

The continued problems at the hospitals underscore the grim reality that overhauling a federal department with almost 300,000 employees scattered across the country is a difficult and tedious process. That truth will almost certainly ensure that Mr. Obama fails to make good on his 2008 campaign promise to fix the “broken bureaucracy of the V.A.” before he leaves office.

But administration officials insist that the situation is getting better, if slowly.

In a highly stage-managed appearance at the Phoenix hospital on Friday, Mr. Obama acknowledged the need for more improvement. But he urged lawmakers and other critics of the system not to let the department’s recent problems keep people from recognizing the good work at the hospitals, including significant progress being made by Robert A. McDonald, the department’s new secretary.

“The fact is that there have been a few bad apples, mistakes that have been made, systems that aren’t designed to get the job done,” he said. “I don’t want that to detract from the outstanding work from a lot of people inside this organization.”

Mr. Obama held a private discussion with the hospital’s managers, elected officials and staff as well as closed visits with some patients. He said that he expected the pace of progress to steadily increase and vowed to hold Mr. McDonald accountable for delivering high-quality care to returning members of the nation’s military and their families.

“We’ve brought in a new team that has been tackling these issues to make sure that wait times for scheduling, access to providers is greatly improved,” the president said in remarks after the closed-door meeting. “But what we know is there is still more work to do.”

Continue reading the main story Mr. Obama said that the incidents of “cooking the books” at the Phoenix medical center and at other facilities had eroded trust among veterans in the hospital system and in the government. But he praised the efforts of the many tens of thousands of department employees working to make the system better.

“Trust is one of those things that you lose real quick and then it takes some time to build,” Mr. Obama said. “The good news is that there are outstanding folks here at this V.A. and all the V.A.s across the country who are deserving of trust.”

Mr. Obama also announced the creation of a new advisory committee made up of representatives from nonprofit organizations, veterans groups and government officials to make recommendations about improving the veterans department.

Republicans who attended the session with the president, including Mr. Obama’s one-time presidential rival, Senator John McCain of Arizona, are dismissive of the president’s claims. They say that reforms in the enormous veterans health care system have been sluggish, and that many of the leaders who presided over the scandal are still in place.

In a statement after the session, Mr. McCain said that the meetings “served more as a photo-op for the president than it did a meaningful discussion of the challenges our veterans continue to face in getting the timely health care they have earned and deserve.”

After Mr. Obama fired Eric K. Shinseki, his first secretary of veterans affairs, he selected Mr. McDonald, the former president and chief executive of Procter & Gamble, to turn around the troubled department.

The new secretary vowed to act “aggressively” in holding people accountable, but since taking control he has fired fewer employees than his predecessor did in the year before he resigned. Mr. McDonald was forced to backtrack in February after claiming on “Meet the Press” that 60 employees had been fired for manipulating wait times. A spokesman later said it was fewer than 20.

The director of the Phoenix hospital, Sharon Helman, was fired in December for accepting improper gifts, not for her role in the scandal. Lance Robinson, the associate director, and Brad Curry, the health administration services director, have been on paid leave for nearly a year, and have been issued “notices of proposed removal,” according to a department spokesman. Another spokeswoman said the investigation of them was continuing.

Dr. Darren Deering, the hospital chief of staff, who told a Senate committee in September that there were no manipulated wait times, remains in his job. Officials said that 1,100 employees across the department were terminated in 2014, but that those terminations were not directly related to actions taken as a result of the scandal.

“Not a single V.A. senior executive has been fired for wait-time manipulation,” Representative Jeff Miller, Republican of Florida and chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, said in a statement this week ahead of the president’s visit to Phoenix. “What’s more, efforts to hold employees accountable in Phoenix have been repeatedly botched.”

Revelations about widespread problems at the hospitals started in Phoenix with the reports that 40 veterans had died while they were stuck on waiting lists to see doctors. The department’s inspector general later said that at least 1,700 veterans in Phoenix were “at risk of being forgotten or lost” in the hospital’s convoluted scheduling process.

All the while, the report said, the hospital falsely reported waiting times that suggested delays were minimal.

Other inquiries documented problems far beyond Phoenix. Rob Nabors, a former deputy chief of staff for Mr. Obama who was sent to work with the department, wrote last summer that a “corrosive culture has led to personnel problems across the department that are seriously impacting morale and, by extension, the timelines of health care.”

Administration officials said this week that the overhaul Mr. Obama ordered last summer had begun to show results.

The addition of night and weekend appointments at the system’s hospitals have allowed doctors to schedule an additional 880,000 patient visits, and total visits for the last seven months of 2014 are up by 1.8 million appointments over the same period a year earlier, officials said.

The hospital system has added 800 new physicians and 1,800 new nurses and 1,300 medical support technicians, helping to reduce delays. But officials said they continued to have trouble recruiting people to work in the troubled health system, especially in rural or out-of-the-way posts. And whistle-blowers who met with Mr. McDonald this week say staffing shortfalls remain a serious concern.

Dr. Foote, the internist, said in an interview on Thursday that in some cases the hospital was hiding delays by persuading veterans to take appointments months in the future, then entering the dates as the veterans’ preference so the appointments did not count in calculations of wait times.

Officials said Mr. McDonald had sought to confront the dysfunctional culture of the department by urging communication among top officials — he has given out his personal cellphone number — and by visiting hospitals personally. Mr. McDonald has been to 80 facilities in less than a year, officials said.

CIA Director Describes How the U.S. Outsources Terror Interrogations

March 12, 2015

by Cora Currier

The Intercept

In rare remarks about a sensitive issue, the director of the CIA confirmed today that the U.S. government works with foreign intelligence agencies to capture and jointly interrogate suspected terrorists.

“There are places throughout the world where CIA has worked with other intelligence services and has been able to bring people into custody and engage in the debriefings of these individuals…through our liaison partners, and sometimes there are joint debriefings that take place as well,” said John Brennan, the CIA director, speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

Brennan’s remarks confirm what journalists have long reported: that the Obama administration sometimes helps other countries do the dirty work of snatching and interrogating terror suspects–keeping the U.S. at arm’s length from operations that are ethically and legally dubious.

During a question-and-answer session, it was Fox News’ Megyn Kelley who questioned Brennan about “capturing terrorists.”

“Are we still doing that?” she asked. “And where are we keeping them and how are we interrogating them?”

Brennan responded that the U.S. is able to work with “partners” to “identify individuals and to have them captured… although there are not a lot of public pieces on Fox News about somebody that might be picked up in different parts of the world.”

In one of his first moves after taking office in 2009, President Obama famously shut down the CIA’s Black Site program, which was begun under President George W. Bush. After 9/11, more than 100 alleged terrorists were captured and sent to secret CIA-run detention centers where they were tortured and interrogated by agency operatives.

Although the Black Sites have been shut down and no new prisoners sent to Guantanamo Bay, detentions of terrorists—and attacks against them–remain a murky issue. The administration has brought several alleged terrorists to face trial in the United States, and it has killed thousands more in drone strikes, along with hundreds of civilians. Obama has also maintained the authority (as President Bill Clinton did in the 1990s) to render people to third countries, where laws are looser.

The Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill and others have detailed cases during the Obama administration in which terror suspects were held in foreign custody at the behest of the U.S. In 2011, Scahill reported for The Nation on a secret prison in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu. Though officially run by the Somali government, Scahill wrote, “US intelligence personnel pay the salaries of intelligence agents and also directly interrogate prisoners” at the facility.

Brennan’s comments today are a rare confirmation that the CIA remains actively involved in the arrest and interrogation of terrorist suspects overseas. He also discussed a restructuring of the CIA that was announced this week, which will blur the traditional distinction between intelligence analysts and on-the-ground operatives. The overhaul brings them together along the model of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, which has spearheaded the agency’s hunting and killing of terror suspects since 9/11. Brennan said it had become common in the “war zone” to have “analysts and operators who are working cheek to jowl,” and that the agency needed “to migrate those efforts to other areas.”

While there have been periodic reports that the Obama administration wants to shift the primary responsibility for drone strikes from the CIA to the military, where there would ostensibly be more transparency, Brennan said the CIA will still maintain “paramilitary skills and capabilities.”

In his wide-ranging remarks, Brennan also discussed cyber threats, saying government networks are under “constant assault” and “private companies are spending enormous sums of money to defend against hacking attempts, denial of service attacks, and other efforts to disrupt their networks.” He was silent, naturally, on the CIA’s own attempts to get inside private tech companies’ operations, like its multi-year effort to crack the security of Apple’s iPhones and iPads, revealed by The Intercept this week.

Benjamin Netanyahu has accused ‘Western governments, and mostly Scandinavian’ of trying to remove him from power by spending millions of dollars on meddling with Israeli upcoming elections where Israel’s prime minister is facing a tough challenge.

“Scandinavian governments have spent millions of dollars on a campaign to remove me from power,” he said in an interview on the Kol Israel radio station.

“Western governments, but mostly Scandinavian…They know perfectly well why they prefer Buji and Livni [his opponents in the elections] to me,” Israeli PM added, as cited by The Local.

Netanyahu’s own Likud Party is facing a tough run against competitors in the elections that take place March 17, where the vote will decide the next prime minister.

The Israeli PM repeated his accusations, addressing “Scandinavian governments” in an interview with Rega Radio station.

“Foreign governments, specifically Scandinavians, are part of a worldwide campaign to topple me,” he said, according to translation posted on Twitter by Israeli blogger and journalist Tal Schneider.

Netanyahu’s ‘they-want-to-topple-me’ comments were far from being welcomed among social media users in Israel.

The relations between Israel and ‘Scandinavia’ have recently been challenged. In October Sweden became the first EU country to recognize Palestine as a state.

“We are not picking sides. We’re choosing the side of the peace process… There is a territory, there is a population and there is a government”, said the country’s new Foreign Minister Margot Wallström. Following Sweden’s decision Israel ambassador to Sweden Isaac Bachman was recalled to Tel Aviv.

“The Swedish foreign minister would not have received any official meetings in Israel if she’d travelled here…It is no secret that Israel sees Sweden’s recognition of the state of Palestine as an extremely unfriendly act,” Israeli foreign ministry spokesperson Emmanuel Nachshon said.

This is not the first statement by Israeli PM on the conspiracy to topple him. Earlier in march he said he believes there is a “huge, worldwide effort” to make sure he does not get reelected in the upcoming elections.

“It is a very tight race,” Netanyahu said in the interview to Army Radio. “Nothing is guaranteed because there is a huge, worldwide effort to topple the Likud government.”

The latest poll for the Jerusalem Post found that the center-left Zionist Union would beat Likud by 24 Knesset seats to 22, although Netanyahu is seen as having a better chance of forming a governing coalition.

US Lawmakers: Russia’s Military Build-up in the Arctic ‘Disturbing’

March 12, 2015

by Kris Osborn

Military.com

Several U.S. lawmakers are warning U.S. military leaders about the pace and scope of Russia’s Arctic militarization, including the addition new brigades, ships and airfields to the fast-changing region.

Russian initiatives are making it increasingly difficult for the U.S. to successfully compete in the area as new sea lanes emerge, they say.

“When you look at what the Russians are doing in the Arctic, it is actually quite impressive –impressive, but disturbing,” Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Ala., told military leaders at a recent Senate Armed Services Committee Navy budget hearing.

“The Russians are looking at adding four new combat brigades in the Arctic as our U.S. Army is thinking at pulling them out of there,” he said. “I think that would give Vladimir Putin a lot of joy. They are building 13 new airfields and conducting long-range air patrols off the coast of Alaska.”

Sullivan said the U.S. military is ill-advised to consider removing one or two Army Brigade Combat teams from Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson and Fort Wainwright in Alaska.

“That we would even contemplate taking one soldier away from Alaska is lunacy given Putin’s recent actions in the Arctic,” he said. “Alaska’s Army BCTs are the best cold-weather and mountain-hardened BCTs in the country. The training makes them uniquely valuable to the U.S. Army and their presence in Alaska hopefully ensures that other nations never make us use them.”

Experts say the pace of melting ice and rising water temperatures is expected to open more waterways in the region and possibly new sea-routes for commercial shipping, transport, strategic military presence and adventure tourism. The developments carry geopolitical and national-security risks, as well.

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan Greenert said the U.S. needs to intensify its preparations for Arctic activity.

“We need to look at it deliberately and understand it,” he said. “We need to get industry up there and study the place and find out when it is going to melt. What are the sea lines that will open? Are there territorial disputes? Are there threats? Russia is increasing their military presence which sort of makes sense. Also, how do we survive up there with our ships our aircraft and our people?”

The Navy is researching technologies that will better enable sailors, ships, sensors and weapons to operate in such a harsh environment.

“We have to look at the hardening of our hulls,” he said. “It is not just surface ships. It is the aircraft and the undersea domain. I’ve directed the increase in our activity up there.”

The Office of Naval Research has deployed drones underneath the ice to assess the temperature and salt content of the water so as to better predict the pace of melting ice and the opening up of sea routes.

Greenert also said the Navy is increasing joint exercises with Canada and Scandinavian countries in preparation for increased Arctic activity.

Despite these measures, some lawmakers are still not convinced that the U.S. is doing enough to counterbalance Russian military initiatives in the region. Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, expressed concern that the U.S. only operates a handful of ice breaker ships compared to Russia’s large fleet of ice breakers.

“We have one heavy duty and one medium-duty Coast Guard ice breakers,” he said. “The Russians have 17 ice breakers in the Arctic. If we are talking about innocent passage and trade, ice breakers are the highway builders and that is an example of how we are really not adequately developing our strategic interests in that region.”

Sullivan also echoed Sen. King’s concerns about the small U.S. fleet of ice breakers, adding that the Russians have six new icebreakers in development with five more planned.

The U.S. has more than 1,000 miles of Arctic coastline along its Alaskan border. However, Russia’s Northern Sea Route, which parallels the Arctic and Russian border, is by far the largest existing shipping route in the region.

Recognizing that the quickening pace of melting ice and warming water temperatures may open up sea lanes sooner than expected, the Navy last year released an Updated Arctic Road Map, which details the service’s preparations for increasing its presence in the region.

The Navy’s initial version of the document released in 2009 includes mission analysis and “fleet readiness” details for the environment, including search and rescue, maritime security, C4ISR, cooperation with the U.S. Coast Guard, strategic sealift and strategic deterrence, among other things.

“The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the globe,” the document states. “While significant uncertainty exists in projections for Arctic ice extent, the current scientific consensus indicates the Arctic may experience nearly ice free summers sometime in the 2030s.”

An assessment by the Navy’s Task Force Climate Change determined the rate of melting has increased since the time of this report. As a result, Navy planners anticipate needing to operate there to a much greater extent by the middle of the 2020s instead of the 2030s.

Although the thinning of the Arctic ice was reported by Navy submarines in the 1990s, there have been considerable changes to the environment since that time, said Robert Freeman, spokesman for the oceanographer of the Navy.

While stressing that budget constraints might limit what preparations are possible, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus also said the service was increasing its exercises and preparations for greater activity in the region.

“As the ice melts in the Arctic our responsibilities go up. It is not just platforms and capabilities — it is what we are facing,” he said. “We not only have less ice but it is freezing in different ways. The ice is forming in different ways that are beginning to be a hazard to navigation. We’re upping our exercises and research into the area.”